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“People in the Northern Hemisphere are now neck-deep in a summer of travel—and so, too, are the coronaviruses they’re carrying,” our Science writer Katherine J. Wu reported in early July. As the summer goes on and the coronavirus subvariant BA.5 continues to spread, I checked back in with Katie about where things are.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Where do the Democrats find these guys? A world without white people A key 9/11 plotter is dead. He was already irrelevant. “A Bizarre Plateau”

Isabel Fattal: Where does America’s COVID-19 situation stand right now?

Katherine J. Wu: Things are not great right now. Based on the patterns of cases that we’re seeing, it’s pretty clear that we’re at a very high level, probably comparable to what we were seeing in terms of caseloads this past winter—among the worst caseloads of the pandemic.

It is true that hospitalization and death rates are down, but the more people you have infected, even a very small percentage can turn into an untenable number of hospitalizations and deaths. And every infection carries the risk of long COVID, or taking people away from school or work or their family. And the worrisome thing is, for the past few months, we’ve been at this bizarre plateau in terms of case counts not really coming back down and looking better.

Isabel: Last week, the Biden administration announced a plan to roll out retooled booster shots, which are expected to offer better protection against BA.5, in September. What’s your reaction to that news?

Katie: That sounds promising, but a lot still really needs to happen before then, and that’s what worries me. These vaccines are still being manufactured. They have not yet been authorized. The FDA hasn’t even seen data to show whether they outperform our current formulation in humans, and if so, by how much. Until that happens, the CDC can’t recommend an eligibility structure.

Is it going to go to high-risk people first? Are we going to have enough doses? We know that COVID funding is an absolute mess right now. And if we have limited doses, who gets them first? Are we going to have enough doses for young, healthy people to get them? Are we going to have enough doses for kids? Our youngest kids are still on their primary series.

The main worry has never been the technology. The concern is deployment, and making sure that people are able and willing to get these shots in an equitable way.

Isabel: What do we know right now about how effective these updated boosters would be against BA.5?

Katie: There’s not a lot of data to go off, so I’m going to be tentative here. I think we can expect them to be an improvement, but I can’t tell you if it’s going to be a 5 percent improvement or a 60 percent improvement. The other big asterisk on this is, what’s going to be around in September? Is it still going to be BA.5, is it going to be BA.6, or is it going to be another variant entirely?

The new vaccine is going to be half the original recipe and half something that is better tailored to BA.4/BA.5. And that, in a way, was a good bet hedge. That’s going to still give us the best of both worlds in terms of broadening our response.  

Isabel: What is one thing the Biden administration should be doing in its COVID-19 response that it’s not doing?

Katie: I think the main thing is to stop with the vaccine monomania. Don’t get me wrong: Vaccines are necessary for this response, but not sufficient. It’s been bizarre to watch the Biden administration say “Get boosted right now” while also loosening guidance around gathering, masking, and distancing, and claiming that America can practically declare independence from the virus. These things don’t match up.

We need multiple approaches to reduce transmission. It’s going bonkers right now, and this is not a sustainable way to coexist with this virus. I’m not saying that people need to have mask mandates forever, but when transmission rates are this high, it is a good idea to think about masking, to think about testing more often, paying attention to who is up-to-date on their vaccines and making sure that our approaches are complementing each other. We still have huge issues with access to Paxlovid, access to tests, access to everything.

Isabel: What are some of your pet peeves about the way the pandemic is being talked about right now?

Katie: We still need to care, but fearmongering too much is also going to make people check out. It’s not necessarily productive to say “Everyone is going to get long COVID by next year” (long COVID’s important to pay attention to, but this almost certainly isn’t true) or “This is the worst variant we have seen so far” (yes, variants are continuing to evolve, but we also have the tools to fight them). Find a way to meet people where they are, get them to tune in, but also trust that they can handle nuance.

Isabel: What else should Americans be thinking about right now in regard to the pandemic?

Katie: I just hope that with all the news about different outbreaks and viruses, people don’t accept this as normal. This is not normal. This is a sign that our public-health responses are failing, that we’re not leveraging the resources we have. This could become our normal if we let it, but it shouldn’t have to.

Related:

The BA.5 wave is what COVID normal looks like. America should’ve been able to handle monkeypox. Today’s News Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi arrived in Taiwan, marking the highest-level visit by an American official in 25 years. Five states are holding primaries today. In Arizona, several Trump-endorsed candidates are on the ballot, including Mark Finchem, who brought the “Stop the Steal” movement to the state. The maker of Oatly recalled 53 products that may have been contaminated. Evening Read (Courtesy Chris Perez Howard)

His Mother’s Life Was a Mystery He Needed to Solve

By Lenika Cruz

Writing about the dead is difficult business. Whenever I write about my mother, I spend a lot of time struggling to recall: How did she take her coffee? What music made her dance? When she laughed, did she throw her head back, like I do? My ability to answer these questions—to try to create an honest portrait of her on the page—is constrained by the five and a half years we spent together before she died. To fill in the gaps, I’ve interviewed family and friends, even built an archive of documents and photos. Each piece of new information—her U.S. naturalization certificate, her honeymoon pictures—is a gift, but it’s also a reminder of all that I will never know about her.

Read the full article.

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Read. A new cultural history of cheerfulness reveals its dark side.

Watch. Somebody Somewhere, an HBO Max show that’s been renewed for a second season. “Expect tears of sadness and of joy,” as our critic puts it.

Or try something else from our watch list of TV shows for short attention spans.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Covering the pandemic isn’t easy, so I asked Katie where she’s found a welcome distraction. Her answer: Rachel Gross’s new book, Vagina Obscura. “It’s a delightfully written dive into one of the human body’s least appreciated organs—one we shouldn’t be embarrassed to study or talk about, in all sorts of settings,” she told me.

— Isabel

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Would you rather watch a video of a man you don’t know rescue a sloth, or read your cousin’s take on the January 6 hearings? Meta is betting on the former.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Of course Joe Biden has rebound COVID. Why do rich people love quiet? Donald Trump supporters think they’re in a fight to the death. Status Update

If you’ve logged into Facebook recently, as almost 2 billion people around the world do each day, you may have noticed something new in your feed: more strangers. Last week, the social-media giant introduced two new different versions of your Facebook feed. While the familiar main page, formerly known as the News Feed, used to be where family, friends, and other accounts you follow have long shared humblebrags, dubious headlines, and slices of everyday life, the new Home page combines those things with posts from strangers it suggests based on your past Facebook activity. When I logged on last week, that meant a video of a man rescuing a sloth from the road and a screenshot of a meme from Twitter about introverts.

A separate new tab, Feeds, will show you only the people you’ve chosen to follow. But with Home, Meta—the parent company of Facebook and Instagram—is clearly steering its users to an experience that emphasizes posts from pages and people you don’t know: viral content selected by an algorithm for maximum entertainment value and slack-jawed viewing time. In other words, Facebook now wants to be TikTok.    

TikTok is a short-form video platform that became famous for viral dances performed by the likes of fresh-faced tweens and teens whose queen was Charli D’Amelio. (Part of that DNA comes from Musical.ly, a lip-synching app that TikTok swallowed up in 2018.) But it truly exploded in the early days of the pandemic, when much of life moved online. Last fall, the app hit 1 billion active users. An estimated 25 percent of TikTok’s users in the U.S. are 10-to-19-years old—a demographic that Meta is hoping to win back.

Now TikTok is much more than a viral dance factory. TikTok generates many of the most inescapable memes, trends, and online debates. (If you’ve recently heard about coastal grandmothers or pink sauce, you have TikTok to thank, or maybe blame.) And if a meme doesn’t originate on TikTok, it usually ends up there, graduating from Twitter or Reddit to achieve true ubiquity. TikTok is now the closest thing the internet has to a town square, a place where every major news story, fashion trend, and cultural moment is filtered and repackaged into a short-form video.

Many young people are turning to TikTok and Instagram instead of Google to search for information such as where to get lunch; more and more, they rely on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube for news, as opposed to traditional outlets. Meanwhile, Facebook’s total user base declined for the first time at the end of 2021. In October, Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced grand plans to pioneer the metaverse and move social media into virtual reality, eventually conceding that the technology needed to do this won’t be mainstream for another five to 10 years. Meta turned to a familiar tactic to regain relevance in the meantime: cribbing features from its contemporaries. (Instagram stories were the company’s successful answer to Snapchat; reels, a less successful rejoinder to TikTok.)

The Home feed is an ambitious, or maybe desperate, attempt to recreate TikTok’s special sauce (not the pink kind). The For You page, TikTok’s main portal, pulls videos from anywhere and everywhere; over time, the algorithm that powers it tailors the content to you based on how you watch and share each type of clip.

When Instagram recently experimented with new TikTok-like features, stars of the platform such as Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner, and Chrissy Teigen howled in protest, and the head of the platform announced last week that it would reduce the number of suggested posts and scrap a new full-screen version as Instagram “works to improve” its algorithm. At the same time, Facebook cut funding for U.S. news publishers, essentially giving up on encouraging the sharing of anything of substance on the app.

No one famous is making a fuss about Facebook’s new changes, but Facebook has never been about famous people, anyway—not even the ones who are momentarily famous thanks to a viral video. Which probably isn’t a good sign for a company that’s prioritizing memes over status updates. Especially when the hot new thing is an app, BeReal, entirely focused on friends sharing “authentic” pictures once a day. Then again, Meta is already testing its own version of that too. Just in case.

Related:

How to leave an internet that’s always in crisis No, I will not BeReal. Today’s News In a step toward alleviating the global food crisis, a ship carrying Ukrainian grain left the port of Odesa for the first time since Russia’s invasion. Nancy Pelosi arrived in Singapore on Monday to kick off her Asia visit. Administration officials say they expect the trip to include a stop in Taiwan, which China has warned would provoke a response. The Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson, who has been accused by a number of women of sexual assault or misconduct, was suspended for six games without pay for violating the NFL’s personal-conduct policy.

Dispatches

Humans Being: Behind the violence and crassness of HBO Max’s Harley Quinn is an unexpectedly heartfelt series, Jordan Calhoun writes. I Have Notes: Culture warriors can try to ban books, but kids will still read them, Nicole Chung argues. Famous People: On a steamy afternoon, Lizzie and Kaitlyn finally learn to shuck oysters. Up for Debate: Readers write in with their experiences of class prejudice in America. Evening Read (Bettmann / Getty)

What Made Bill Russell a Hero

By Jemele Hill

Not many people can make Charles Barkley, the former NBA MVP and legendarily outspoken broadcaster, pipe down. But the NBA icon Bill Russell, who died on Sunday age 88, once called Barkley and did just that.

“He called me. ‘Charles Barkley, this is Bill Russell.’ I said, ‘Oh hey, Mr. Russell,’” Barkley told me. “He said, ‘I need you to shut the fuck up.’ I said, ‘Okay.’”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

The myth of independent American families American motherhood Should the Parkland shooter die? Culture Break (Carlijn Jacobs / Parkwood Entertainment)

Read. Deacon King Kong, by James McBride, a novel so propulsive and fun that it’s almost hot to the touch.

Watch. The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie (available to rent on multiple platforms) is a pre-Clueless, Skittles-tinted ode to California ditz—but also so much more.

Listen. Beyoncé’s Renaissance is a big, gay mess. Hell yes, our critic writes.  

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Thanks for letting me hop on today’s Daily! If it didn’t make you curious about TikTok, maybe this will: The wonderfully woodsy TikTok hit “Stick Season,” by Noah Kahan. The artist first posted a snippet of the song back in October 2020, but it didn’t take off until last month, when users started sharing videos of their own covers. The song broke into the Spotify USA chart on July 20, and you can now catch Kahan on tour—if your city’s dates haven’t sold out.

— Kate

Isabel Fattal contributed to this newsletter.