562 - The Pandemic is Not Over
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2023
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As we enter the fourth year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Mike Osterholm, a leading expert from the University of Minnesota, talks to Stephanie Desmon about why hundreds of people in the U.S. continue to die each day from COVID and tens of thousands are newly hospitalized. They discuss the question he gets asked most often, "Is this pandemic ever going to end?", as well as coming variants, the massive outbreaks in China, and the lack of demand for vaccines and treatments that are effective in preventing death and severe disease.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:06.0 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.0 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh.h.u.edu. |
| 0:23.8 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:31.7 | This is Stephanie Desmond. |
| 0:33.6 | Today, as we enter the fourth year of the COVID pandemic, I talked to Dr. Mike Osterholm, |
| 0:38.7 | and leading expert from the University of Minnesota about whether the pandemic is ever going to end |
| 0:43.8 | and what we need to be concerned about until it does. Let's listen. Mike Osterholm, |
| 0:49.5 | thanks so much for joining me. Thank you very much. So here we are January 2023, which puts us in really year |
| 0:59.3 | four of the COVID pandemic. I guess I'm wondering for someone like you, what still keeps you up at |
| 1:05.7 | night about COVID? Well, despite the fact that most of the world seems to think the pandemic is over with, it's not. |
| 1:13.4 | And I keep wondering each and every day, when I wake up and look at my crystal ball that has five inches of cake mud on it, what is going to happen today? |
| 1:23.2 | And this virus continues to throw 270-mile-an-hour curveballs at us day after day after day. |
| 1:29.3 | And I think that has left a lot of people feeling very uncertain. |
| 1:33.3 | Well, wait a minute, is the pandemic over? Is it going to be over? What does it mean? |
| 1:37.3 | And that challenge, I think, both from a psychological standpoint where many people are over the pandemic psychologically. Unfortunately, we're still |
| 1:45.4 | seeing up to 450 deaths a day. We're still seeing over 45,000 hospitalizations a day in this |
| 1:51.1 | country. And globally, we're seeing major uptick in activity, not just in China, but in a number |
| 1:56.8 | of countries around the world. So you sort of raised the question yourself. I mean, |
| 2:01.2 | how do we get to the end of this? Will this pandemic ever end? Well, I'm sure the pandemic will |
| 2:07.0 | end. I hope I'm around long enough to actually witness that. More specifically, I think that I |
| 2:12.1 | probably won't personally feel comfortable that it's over with, probably until at least two |
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