On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast:
The Omicron variant is reportedly more contagious than the Delta variant and with case numbers up all across the United States the questions on everyone’s mind are how can I avoid getting sick? Does everyone need to wear an N95 mask to avoid Omicron? When will children under the age of 5 be vaccinated? And most importantly, when will the Omicron surge end? USA Today’s national correspondent Elizabeth Weise joins us on the 5 Things podcast to answer your questions about Omicron.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Shannon Rae Gre…: Hey there, I’m Shannon Rae Green, and this is 5 Things. It’s Sunday, January 9th. These Sunday episodes are special, we’re focusing on just one story instead of five, to go a little further into one topic, let us know what you think. You can always tweet me @shannonraegreen. My son was born July 9th, 2020, he turns 18 months old today. He is one of the many kids in America who are under the age of five, who have parents like me, who are wondering when their babies will be able to get vaccinated? Well, it hasn’t even been a full month since I brought USA Today’s health reporter, Elizabeth Weise, onto the show. And we’re doing that again. She was last on a Sunday episode of 5 Things talking about the Omicron variant at that time. And Beth didn’t, we have you on more than two episodes this week?
Elizabeth Weise: COVID is kind of the all-encompassing story, that and a few other things. There’s a lot of news happening right now.
Shannon Rae Gre…: There’s so much news. My teammates who work with me on the podcast like to say that we have you on as a guest so often that we need to just start introducing you as a co-host. This time, I asked folks on Twitter for questions they wanted to ask you, and that I’d get them answered by my co-host. So let’s call this episode an AYA with Elizabeth Weise. Yep, that’s an ask you anything. Beth, last time we talked about how people could figure out even with the Omicron risk, and people wanted to get together because it was the holidays, or they at least wanted to get together to celebrate the end of the year.
And also, that we’ve just been going for so long without really being around each other as easily, or as often as we would’ve liked to. And it’s just, it’s feeling really hard. The advice you gave me was so helpful. Ask your family to test, open windows, wear masks in public. And you told me that you had plans to be with family to share dinner, maybe with friends too. And you asked people to test and you might have opened windows, how did that go?
Elizabeth Weise: It went great. We had a lovely Christmas Eve Eve dinner, and then we had a lovely New Year’s Eve Eve dinner, and everybody was vaccinated, and we all tested the day of, and nobody got sick. That was a win-win. They were great meals, it was wonderful to see people for Christmas and New Year’s and we all stayed healthy. And at this point, Omicron is so crazily contagious that it’s not like you should feel bad if you get it, it’s just because it would not have at all surprised me if someone had gotten it because it is so crazy contagious. But we at least knew that we had done everything that we could to protect ourselves. And for us it worked and we were lucky.
Shannon Rae Gre…: That’s really the best news. And I think that you kept me safe actually, Beth, because my family tested and somebody tested positive. So it was great that I was able to not be breathing around them, honestly. So I really am grateful for the fantastic advice that it’s all about me. We have listeners who want this information too, but did you anticipate that this surge was going to be this intense?
Elizabeth Weise: Boy these days, can one anticipate anything at all? Yeah, I thought it was going to be bad because it was looking to be so much more infectious, and we didn’t quite know how much more infectious. I actually wrote a story, that Omicron is four times more contagious than the original variant. And that’s a lot, that’s a lot. I mean, we’re not quite at the measles virus where you just walk through a room a half an hour after somebody with measles walked through and you could get it. I mean, measles is crazy, crazy infectious. But Omicron’s really infectious enough. So yeah, I was concerned and the story that I’m hoarding, I spend all day on the phone with people, and I’ll write it next week is, on how this is affecting hospitals. The blessing is that Omicron, it’s more contagious, but less virulent. It makes you less sick. But if more people are getting sick and even a small percentage of those people get sick, we’re going to see a lot of sick people.
And in the places where Omicron is surging, we’re starting to see those high numbers arrive at hospitals, and our hospitals are already so stressed. And actually, I just got off the phone before you and I got out on talking, the group at the University of Texas at Austin who’s modeling COVID, I mean, they’ve been doing it for two years now and they just they’ve been modeling the outbreak, and let’s see. And they’ve got a pessimistic scenario and an optimistic scenario. And the peak of the Omicron wave peaking sometime between January 9th and 13th. And the thing to remember about that is that’s people getting sick, but so say you come down with COVID, you don’t get sick enough to show up at the ER for a couple of days to a week. And it’s hard to talk about, but you don’t die for a couple of more weeks. And so even though the peak hasn’t even hit yet, it’s going to last for a long time because once that many people get sick, we’ll start seeing the hospitalizations and eventually the death.
Shannon Rae Gre…: The other thing about this that’s so unfortunate is the bad timing because it is a time where people are getting sick with the flu, they’re also driving on icy roads, and more dangerous weather conditions. People can slip on the ice while they’re walking out their front door. So it just, I feel like the timing of this is just really difficult for so many people. I do want to get to the questions that people ask me on Twitter. Diamond S, whose handle is @art_DJsmiles, asked this, are there any plans to get proper masks to underserved communities, not surgical, but N95 or better, as this isn’t going away?
Elizabeth Weise: So currently, the focus of the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services has been testing, because tests are really what is in short supply everywhere. We can talk about that later. There was for masks, there was actually a big push by the White House and the Defense Logistics Agency back in February, to provide 25 million cloth masks to low-income communities, which did go out. A lot of them went to community clinics. I was looking around to see if there were any efforts right now to get N95s out. I didn’t find any, that doesn’t mean it’s not happening, but I didn’t find any. And most of the discussion we’re hearing now is really on trying to get tests out to kids, well, to the whole country, and especially to families with kids so that they can test so that their kids can get back into school.
Shannon Rae Gre…: Is there anything specific there about underserved communities that is part of the focus?
Elizabeth Weise: So as far as I know right now, there’s no specific plan at the federal level to get masks out to underserved communities. And as I said, it’s possible that something’s going on I don’t know about. I haven’t heard about it, and when I was searching around, I didn’t see anything, so I don’t think so, but if there is, I would love to hear about it.
Shannon Rae Gre…: So here’s another question that came in on Twitter. Kellie, whose handle is @fablefiddler, had a comment about masks that I thought, Beth, you may be able to provide some thoughts about. Kellie’s tweet reads, “There is still a shortage and it’s not just the mask but the fit and hygiene in donning, doffing and disposal.” So can you talk about how people might be able to educate themselves about that?
Elizabeth Weise: As I pull out my stack of masks here in my desk, I have a cubby hole and it’s full of masks. Actually, and I was just rereading the CDC’s website. I mean, to do it totally right, you would have four or five little lunch bag sized, paper bags, and each day you would come home, put your mask in one of those bags, close it up, and then let it sit for four days so that all the microbes had time to die. That you can kind of cycle through. I think most of us hang them on the dashboard of our car and things like that. And we kind of wait. The most important thing with a mask is you want it to be a good fit because the whole thing about a mask is you want it to filter the air that’s coming into you so you are not breathing in virus.
If you put your mask on and you cup your hands at the edge of the masks and breathe, and you feel air going in and out, then that means the mask isn’t tight enough to filter out that air. I mean, it’s going to get some of it. You really want it pretty darn tight. And I will tell you, when I’ve talked to doctors, so when you are a doctor and you go into the hospital, they test you to figure out what size mask you would take. And they actually, you go into a room and there’s a specific person who does this, and they give you the mask and they give you a couple of different sizes til they make sure the N95 is the right size for your face. And then they tweak the nose thing. And then they spray this weird smelling stuff into the room, and you breathe in to see if you can smell it.
And if you can’t smell it, it means that the mask is a strong fit and that air is going through the mask and it’s getting filtered out. And if you can smell it, it means that it’s not the right fit and they need to start over again, because they really want to make sure you don’t get sick. And this is true for nurses too. So a mask can be a really remarkably good way of keeping the virus out of your body. But most of us at home, it’s a little harder to achieve that level of really strong protection. Actually yesterday I went out and because I had spent the whole day writing about Omicron and I was just feeling a little nervous, I double masked. So I had one of those blue surgical masks first, and then I put an N95 on top of it. And I could feel that when I was pulling in air, it was coming through the masks, it was not going out the sides. It was definitely coming through the masks. So I may have digressed a lot, tell me again what the question was.
Shannon Rae Gre…: No, no, that’s totally perfect. You’re talking about hygiene with the masks and the fit, so I really appreciate those details there. And I think Kellie, @fablefiddler, will too. So you said you would talk about the difficulties with finding a test and whether that’s going to improve for people in the coming days.
Elizabeth Weise: The fact that testing is going up so much tells you that there’s just a lot more cases out there. And also, I mean, we’re starting to have kids needing them to get into school, people needing them to get back into work after they’ve gotten better. I think, on average, Johns Hopkins University Testing Tracker thinks that Americans are doing about 2 million tests a day. And those 2 million are just in the lab, those aren’t home tests. So the rapid antigen tests that you find in drug stores, and at Walmart, and places like that, those are selling out really fast. And part of that is, and I mean, this is one of the problems when you have a health system that it’s based on the market because the market responds to very direct signals. So all the makers of these tests started to scale back manufacturing in the spring because cases were falling and they looked at the numbers and said, “Ah, we’re not going to need to make as many tests because cases are going down.”
And then lo and behold, they came up. And so now they’re really hustling to get factories producing at the absolute highest ability they can because we need more tests. So it’s going to take a while for everybody to get ramped back up. I mean, tests are in short supply right now. And I know where I am actually, because I’ve been working, I wasn’t able to, and I needed more on to get my daughter back to school, and her godfather, bless him, went to stand outside of a Walgreens before it opened up this morning because the first 15 people in line were able to go in and buy two, only two tests, because that’s all they were allowing, because that’s what they had for that days. It’s going to get better, but it’s going to take a while. And that means, you wait and you mask, you may not be able to test immediately and say I’m COVID free, and yeah, it’s rough.
Shannon Rae Gre…: Yeah. To go back to masks briefly, I definitely saw more were than a few tweets and Instagram posts that said all I want for Christmas is an N95 mask. My question here is, does everyone need N95s? Is that the new recommendation?
Elizabeth Weise: Yeah. An N95 is the best, if you can find it. If you can’t find it, double mask. One of the paper surgical masks that, I mean, those seem to be easier to find these days, one of those and then a cloth mask on top. And pull them nice and tight, and you’re doing well. The Gators just don’t work that well, I’m sorry to say. I mean, if that’s all you’ve got or if that’s all you’re going to wear, it’s better than nothing. Just do wear it over your nose because really air comes in and out of your nose.
Shannon Rae Gre…: Right. I feel like you’ve been the calm voice of reason for me on this podcast with the different variations and options we do have. So Beth, this is a difficult question to ask and probably even harder to answer. What’s the long-term outlook here when it comes to the pandemic and in particular, our country’s fight against COVID-19?
Elizabeth Weise: Yeah, boy. I tell you, if I could really answer that, I’d probably make a whole lot more money working for a stock firm or something, but I don’t. So eventually, this will become endemic. It’ll be like the flu, something that still kills between 8,000 and, a couple of dozen thousand people a year, depending on how severe it is. But enough people will have been exposed or vaccinated, and the virus itself, they tend to get less virulent over time. So eventually, we’ll get there. People have been saying that Omicron could be the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning, because so many people are getting it and it is less virulent. So if you got it, your immune system has had another lovely bit of information about how to fight it off the next time. So that’s really good.
There was a difficult to hear point in Dr. Walensky, the head of the CDC, gave a news conference on Friday in which she said, it’s looking like, anecdotally at least, they don’t have actual data, but anecdotally they think that having had Delta does not necessarily protect you from Omicron, which was a bummer. Immunologically, if you got Delta and then you got Omicron, again, the most important thing, and I have to keep coming back to this, the absolutely most important thing is you don’t want to end up in the hospital, intubated and potentially dying.
You probably did this, when you are pregnant and you go and you are in your little birthing group and they run all the games with you about thinking about your birth, and they start out with a stack of cards about all the things you want to happen during the birth, I want beautiful music playing and I want lovely lights and I want flowers and I want this and they say, “Okay, take one away, take one away, take one away.” And in the end, the last card and the only card that you really want is the one that says, “I want a healthy baby.” And COVID is like that. In the end, all you care about is that you don’t get horribly sick or die. And so if you get COVID, and if we all end up getting COVID every couple of years, like we do with the flu, but it doesn’t kill us, that’s okay. I mean, it’s annoying, but as long as it doesn’t kill us, that’s okay. And eventually, we will get there. Well, people who are vaccinated will get there. People who are unvaccinated, it’s a rougher road [inaudible 00:15:41].
Shannon Rae Gre…: Yeah, thank you. When you were on the show, less than a month ago, we were talking about what’s the risk with Omicron to unvaccinated kids? What’s the risk to people who are immunocompromised? Is there more information that’s come in about whether the variant is considered to be more mild? So my question is, in the few weeks that you haven’t been on a long episode of 5 Things, is there any new information that you would want to share?
Elizabeth Weise: We have a lot more kids who are being hospitalized for COVID right now, but it looks like that’s just because so many more kids are getting it. And if 1 in 500 kids gets it ends up in the hospital, then if a million kids get it, a certain number will show up in the hospital. And if 5 million get it, then even more. It’s looks like Omicron is still milder than the other strains. It’s just that so many more kids and babies are getting it, that probably a smaller percentage of them are getting really sick. But a small percentage of a lot of kids is still too many kids.
Shannon Rae Gre…: Is there any new information that you wanted to share?
Elizabeth Weise: There’s nothing really new, I think. So talking to the people who are modeling Omicron, the good thing about Omicron is it’s so contagious that it ramps up really fast, and then in South Africa, they saw cases plummet really quickly. And so if you can kind of hang on for the next two to three weeks and just say, “Okay, fine. I’m just, I’m going to double mask for three weeks. Darn it, no fun, but that’s what I’m going to do,” then you might be able to avoid getting it, which would be good. The Omicron surge is not going to last forever. And so this might be a time to kind of say, well, a lot of us are doing Dry January where we don’t drink alcohol, maybe you do a Masked January, where you pledge to double mask when you go out.
Shannon Rae Gre…: So smart, I love that idea. That is actually, I spoke with Alia Dastagir about being sober-curious, and speaking of Dry January. Thank you so much for being on the show. I just, I feel so fortunate that I am able to ask you these questions. You’re such a kind and an incredibly informed person on this topic. So just thank you. How can people find your work, Beth?
Elizabeth Weise: So you can Google me online. It’s Elizabeth Weise, W-E-I-S-E. And if you do Elizabeth Weise and USA Today, my story should pop up. And some of them will be behind the paywall because we have to figure out how we pay people to do this work. So subscribe if you possibly can. And if you can’t, some of them will not be behind the paywall, so you’ll still be able to see them.
Shannon Rae Gre…: Yes, support amazing journalism and journalists like Beth and myself. You can find more information and you can even find deals at subscribe.usatoday.com. Thank you, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise: You’re so welcome. I’m always glad to be on the show. It’s fun.
Shannon Rae Gre…: If you liked this episode of 5 Things, please write us a review on Apple Podcast. You can also tweet us @usatoday. I want to say thanks to Alexis Davies for her help editing this episode and a big thanks to my co-host, Elizabeth Weise. Taylor Wilson will be back tomorrow morning with 5 Things you need to know for Monday. Thanks so much for listening, I am Shannon Rae Green. I’m wishing all of you the best. Drop me a line on Twitter, I’m @shannonraegreen. I’d love to hear from you. Until then, I’ll see you next Sunday.
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