What we've noticed is that the Delta variant is about a thousand times
higher amount of virus in people's nose than the initial variant that we saw back in February and
March of 2020 and so that means there's a lot more virus being spread out and that also means that it
is much more easily transmitted. If everybody had been vaccinated, this may have been totally averted
but given the fact that it has not been such, what we have to do is start putting up the same
barriers that helped us cut things down, so-called nonpharmacologic interventions, for addressing COVID transmission.
To be honest, I never stopped wearing a mask in a grocery store because I've never trusted that
everybody not masked is truly vaccinated and so I believe that we're back to, if you
go grocery shopping, you got a mask up. If you're outdoors, you probably still can get away without
masking, but anything indoors where you're not within your own little bubble of people who
you know are vaccinated and are part of your family, you have to mask up. I think for the general
public, because most people are not fit tested, their n95s don't necessarily work like n95s anyhow
and i think for the general public, unless you're going to be in very intense circumstances,
wearing a surgical mask should be more than adequate or wearing a good cloth
mask that fits well, particularly cloth masks that actually have these filters on the inside of them.
Every time the virus multiplies, it mutates and every time it mutates,
if the mutation is beneficial to the virus, then it gets carried forward, so
Delta isn't going to be the last variant and that is
in large part on the unvaccinated community who are helping to generate all these variants, which
will make it more and more difficult to control the pandemic. People keep saying,
"I don't know whether it's safe or not." There are 150 million people who have been vaccinated.
The number of severe illness signals are minimal. This is a safe vaccine and it works. We felt
like we were close to the end and now we're right back in the soup again. It's maddening.
I think the one take home message is, if anybody ever wants this pandemic to end,
they've got to get vaccinated and if they have questions, there are plenty
of people who can answer questions, This is the way out of the pandemic. We have to get
the population immune. Right, you know, when people talked about getting herd immunity with the older
strains of virus maybe 70 percent would have been good enough but now we're looking at a
strain that's much more transmissible and we have to get up into the 80s, maybe as high as
90 percent to really get herd immunity. For all the people who don't like wearing masks and who
find all this intervention annoying, get a vaccine. That's the way you get done with all this stuff.