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.

Last year at this time, the highly transmissible Delta variant became the dominant SARS-CoV-2

variant in the United States.

Working in the beginning of a surge of new COVID-19 cases and bringing an abrupt end to the

country's optimism that the pandemic would soon be over.

It would be the beginning of a period culminating in this winter's Omicron wave that may have

been the very worst stretch of the pandemic the country has seen.

A year and several variants later, we now have a newly dominant variant, BA5, that is

the most transmissible version of the virus we've seen, and we could be seeing in other

surge cases, but with much of the country having moved on, it's hard to tell at this point.

Today on this July 8th episode of the podcast, we're going to talk about how the BA5 Omicron

sub variant may or may not change the trajectory of the pandemic here in the United States and

elsewhere.

We'll also talk about how reduced testing in the drop-off and official case reporting

may affect our insight into what comes next, discuss the FDA's recommendation on updated

...