significant health risk to an individual but this is a problem. this is not just an infectious virus. this is not just eating healthier and avoiding folks. this is a dangerous stress. and there are others who may be more vulnerable than the person in question. if the average vaccinated and boosted american who gets covid is just going to have a few bad days in bed at most, then why should the country start to close schools and why should offices start to empty again, katherine? well, i think we do have to keep in mind that not everyone is vaccinated. certainly not everyone but they screwed up. what about for the vaccinated, boosted americans, why should they suffer now? i mean, hopefully, we can remind ourselves that again this is a collective issue. the decisions people make, regardless of vaccination status, are going to affect the people around them. not everyone vaccinated and boosted is entirely in the career. remember we have people who are
the media is no monolith, as you know. could we find examples of the media overreacting? yes, we could. there have been times i would say clearly the dominant strain of media coverage has been overreaction. i don t think we re in that moment right now. again, we can find examples of overreaction. but omicron is serious and it requires a really nuanced response in which we try to acknowledge the fact that for most boosted people, the risks really remain quite low. for children, they remain minute sch minuscule. you re probably putting your kid in more risk by putting them in a car today than omicron presents. and yet it not only presents a risk to the unvaccinated, as katherine was saying, but it does to older people in their 70s and 80s. i m not saying we should grind to a halt to get that number down to zero but to say cases
are rising rapidly, we don t know what s going on, there s a good chance we ll have overwhelmed hospitals, i think that s the right message at this point for the media to convey. david and katherine, thank you both for the insight. after the break, what cnn and others are are doing in response to the surge. and fox s embarrassing rival situation. we have fresh details you won t hear anywhere else. are the only thing you ll be waiting on joy. fully. this. is the planning effect. this is how it feels to have a dedicated fidelity advisor looking at your full financial picture. this is what it s like to have a comprehensive wealth plan with tax-smart investing strategies designed to help you keep more of what you earn. and set aside more for things like healthcare, or whatever comes down the road.
variant. we don t exactly know why, how much of that is because of how it spreads between unvaccinated people or whether it s all because of the fact that vaccinated people are more likely to get mild cases than they were before. but it s more contagious. the early evidence suggests it s somewhat less severe. that is uncertain. and it is a little bit less reassuring than it may sound at first. let s imagine it s 30% less severe. that sounds like a big deal, but if it causes three, four, five times as many cases, it can still lead to overwhelmed hospitals. so i think uncertainty is number one. number two is it s more contagious. number three is as breaest as w can tell, it s not more severe than other cases. as katherine mentioned in her writing, if you re vaccinated and especially boosted, omicron probably does not change your health risk, individual health risk, in a huge way. but for the population, it s really scary. katherine, do you agree with
the atlantic, and lately that means covering covid. david and katherine, thank you both for coming on the program. thanks, brian. thank you for having us. how are you thinking about this weekend and these surges? you and i know what s happened the past few days. major metropolitan areas where a lot of journalists, there s been an incredible spike in covid cases, a lot of attention on it now and i think there s debates about how to be covering the story and how to be assessing cases differently. is the nfl the right pathway forward? is the nfl s changing protocol is that the right pathway forward now? i m not sure it s the right pathway for everyone. i do think directionally it tends to treat this differently the way the nfl is doing it. here s basically how i think of it. i think, brian, your point about uncertainty is really the first point. there s an enormous amount about omicron we still do not know. based on the best available evidence, it almost certainly seems to be su