The reality is that the virus is with us. The reality is that the first wave only hit a small number of places -- now it's coming to every other place. It's coming to a county or a city or a state near Ashish Jha.

Ashish Jha

There's so much more virus around, people who are infected have such high viral loads, but even short periods of time -- five minutes, seven minutes, you don't even have to be within six feet, for people who are unvaccinated, they are getting infected with much, much shorter exposure.

This is the most contagious version of the virus we have seen throughout the whole pandemic, it's really very contagious.

If you're in a low-infection, high-vaccination area, you don't need to be wearing a mask indoors if you're fully vaccinated, if I were in southwest Missouri right now, I'm fully vaccinated but I would be wearing a mask indoors.

Let's move on with our lives. And the fact that we're fighting these things is incredibly frustrating, because we're fighting ourselves, not just the virus anymore.

We are in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century. We actually have a ticket out.

Kids thankfully don't get as sick as adults, but kids do get sick. We've seen a lot of hospitalizations and unfortunately even a few deaths in kids from this disease, we are in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century. We actually have a ticket out.

It's really going to have to be an all-of-the-above strategy, of bringing vaccines to people, it's the ground game and it's going to be a lot of work.

That's a problem, we're going to be stuck with dealing with this for a long time.

If we just don't vaccinate, then obviously one of the things we've known is we get big outbreaks, you can get more variants, it's going to be hard to do those large gatherings, indoor concerts, outdoor baseball games, this stuff will get much, much harder if we do not make more progress on vaccinations.

That will immediately add millions of more people eligible for vaccination. I bet a lot of those kids will get vaccinated, that will make a big difference as well in terms of building up population immunity.

This pandemic now is really among young people and it is a very dangerous time to be unvaccinated in the country because it is spreading pretty efficiently among young people and unvaccinated people.

Case numbers will plummet. We may not be at herd immunity, we'll see little outbreaks here and there but life will begin to really get back to normal.

That is what’s going to break the back of this surge.

I’ve been ... trying to say to them, `If everything goes very well, things will be horrible for the next several weeks. And it may be much longer,‘.

If we made IP available today, we will not add vaccines today. It's about tech transfer, knowledge of making vaccines. This is really about a complex biological agent. It's not clear to me that George Mason University.The moment India has a lot of unused vaccine capacity. The issue is building new capacity.

For selfish reasons, every country should be concerned about large outbreaks that are out of control, countries like the United Kingdom and United States are doing a great job with vaccinations, and they should be feeling great about United Kingdom, but United Kingdom's only as good as variants that are out there.

I think it’s critically important that we keep indoor mask mandates in for a while. We can’t give up on those, not while infection numbers are high. But it also means telling people what they can relax on, and wearing masks outside, again, unless you’re in a very, very crowded space for extended periods of time, probably doesn’t do much to protect you or protect others.

I expect, over the next few weeks, states to start lifting outdoor mask mandates.

We're not there yet and the variants make it particularly concerning, we really do have to hunker down for a few more weeks. We are very close to the finish line but we can't stop yet.

If we could get some of these tests a bit more scaled up, we could use testing alone as a way to control the pandemic.