Hello and welcome to the Ostrome Update COVID-19, a podcast on the COVID-19 pandemic with

Dr. Michael Ostrome.

Dr. Ostrome is an internationally recognized medical detective and director of the Center

for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, or CITRAP, at the University of Minnesota.

In this podcast, Dr. Ostrome will draw on more than 45 years of experience investigating

infectious disease outbreaks to provide straight talk on the COVID-19 pandemic.

I'm Chris Dahl, reporter for CITRAP News, and I'm your host for these conversations.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ostrome Update Podcast.

As I'd like to do every so often in preparing for another episode of the podcast, I recently

went back and looked at my script from last year at this time, specifically the May 13th

2021 episode.

At that time, India was a house on fire with the Delta variant of the coronavirus, while

US cases were rapidly declining amid the nationwide vaccine rollout.

It seemed here in the US at least that the end of the pandemic was near, but what was happening

in India would turn out to be important of the coming Delta wave in the US.

In retrospect, though Delta was not the first variant, it was the first indication that

vaccines, as effective as they have been at preventing severe disease and death, were

not going to end the pandemic.

Here we are a year later, on our third and fourth doses of the vaccine, with yet another

coronavirus variant causing a rise in infections.

The threat is different now, as the rising cases we are currently seeing in the US does

not appear to be causing the level of severe disease we've seen with previous waves, but

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