[APPLAUSE]
Hey.
Ellen, hey.
How are you?
Thanks for having me.
It's so nice.
I'm doing OK.
It's your first time on the show,
but I'm a big fan as well of yours.
And we tape in Los Angeles.
The numbers here are incred--
it's one in five people are testing positive for COVID.
What has happened?
Why is that happening here?
Well, you know, it's one of these things where you have
exponential growth happening.
There's so much virus that is now spreading in the area,
that there's 10 people being diagnosed as positive almost
every minute.
And there's obviously lots of people who are still
congregating, sometimes because of essential work
and things like that.
But it's a really challenging thing right now
to try and break that trajectory of growth just how-- it's
like a fast moving cruise ship going through the ocean,
even if you slam on the brakes, it's still
going to move for a while.
That's what's been happening in Los Angeles.
And so now there's this new strain, which--
a couple of questions here.
First of all, does that mean there'll
be another strain because it keeps
mutating so we're going to have all these different things.
Right.
And then also can someone who's just
had COVID, like myself, can then you get the new strain.
Yeah, so with regard to the first question,
it is likely that these viruses mutate.
That is part of just being the viruses.
And these coronaviruses mutate a lot actually.
So this was not unexpected.
What is interesting when you think about these mutations,
and I'm not assigning a personality or a will
to a virus, but what they're trying
to do is they're trying to mutate into a form
where they can spread easily, they
can have lots of homes, lots of hosts, that's us.
But they don't want to kill their hosts.
So oftentimes it becomes less lethal
while it becomes more contagious.
That's often what's happening.
That's maybe what this UK variant is.
We'll see what the South African variant.
Your antibodies from your recent illness
should protect you against this UK variant.
I was looking into that actually and the antibodies
seem to be protecting.
Now it may mutate again and we'll see.
And that's why the vaccine is going to be important.
But right now you should be safe.
OK, well, that's good to know.
And then I also--
my blood type is O. And I heard that if you have O blood type,
you have less severe symptoms.
Is that true?
They've seen this in a few studies.
And it's really interesting.
I mean, we don't know why that's the case.
And it may be one of those things
where they take a bunch of people
and they look at the data and they find interesting trends,
but the trends may not actually mean anything.
As more and more people get it, maybe those trends
actually aren't real.
But you're right.
People who have O type blood seem to have less symptoms.
They seem to be less likely to get hospitalized.
We don't know if it's something about the blood itself
or if it's something else, but I'm
glad you had it in this case.
Yeah, well, me too.
So a lot of people are having trouble getting the vaccine.
They're saying it could take years
to get everyone vaccinated.
Is that true?
And how bad is it?
I mean, that doesn't seem like what we all were expecting.
No, I mean, the roll out of the vaccine, I think,
has been surprisingly disappointing.
And I say surprisingly, because Operation Warp Speed, which
was this huge government project to create the vaccine,
it's really remarkable what has happened now.
And I mean, we have two authorized vaccines
within a year.
Things like HIV/AIDS, 40 years, we don't have a vaccine.
It wasn't inevitable that we were going to have a vaccine.
And we have two authorized.
But then it was like the ball was dropped after that.
The vaccines are great, but vaccinations are what matter.
And they just haven't been rolling out fast enough.
I think it's going to improve.
And I think it's going to improve a lot actually.
There'll be stadiums.
There'll be pharmacies getting involved.
You may be able to make an appointment at your doctor's
office.
But this should have already happened.
I mean, this is a public health emergency
and sometimes you get the sense that we're not
treating it that way.
Because this would have been so important to get right.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
So you're getting your second dose--
you had it already or you're getting it any minute?
I got it.
You got it?
I got it this past week.
And how do you feel?
Because they say the second dose supposedly you get symptoms.
Yeah, so I did get symptoms.
And you know, it's interesting because I don't really
get symptoms.
So I got it around 7:30 in the morning on Friday.
I think it was around 6:30 that evening, about 11:00 hours
later, that I started to--
I had a little bit of muscle pain,
but then my joints were hurting a little bit.
It wasn't bad.
But I just felt like I didn't really want to do anything.
I just wanted to get into bed, which I did.
And throughout the night, I had a bit of back pain too,
kind of like what you were describing.
But by morning, it was pretty much resolved.
And it's important to point out that that was totally expected.
About 15% of people do get significant symptoms.
And it's not because you got infected.
Like in your case the symptoms you
had were because of the virus.
In my case, it was just because of the immune system revving up
in response to the vaccine.
So I wasn't infected.
I got better, I think, by the following night
I was mostly back to normal.