Podcast: Breakthrough Infections and Lonely Puppies

While COVID-19 case counts in the United States continue to drop, you might still be reading worrisome headlines about variants and “breakthrough” infections. Fortunately, The Atlantic staff writer Katherine Wu explains to James Hamblin and Maeve Higgins why these shouldn’t alarm us just yet. And staff writer Sarah Zhang drops in to help figure out how to keep pandemic puppies from being too anxious as people return to pre-pandemic routines.

What follows is a transcript of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity:

Maeve Higgins: People are ready to party, but if people are still getting COVID-19 after the vaccine, even if it’s not that often, how worried should we be?

Katherine Wu: I think there’s two ways to answer that question. Collectively, we should not be super worried. I think on a population level, these so-called breakthrough infections where people are getting infected with the virus and very occasionally getting sick despite being fully vaccinated … it’s so, so, so rare. And even the people who are picking up the virus don’t seem to be getting as sick; in short, the vaccines are doing their job. That’s why I don’t want to downplay how concerning this can be for that individual person who does get infected or sick, or the worries of the people around them. It’s really tough to talk about these breakthrough infections because we do want to track them and pay attention to them on an individual level. But broadly, I do not see anything that is unexpected, to be totally honest.

James Hamblin: Can you catch up just on the basic numbers? How many cases have been reported in the U.S. and how are we defining cases?

There’s kind of two numbers that I can tell you at this point. One is going to be a number that is only