Hello and welcome to the Osterholm update, a podcast on COVID-19 and other infectious diseases with Dr Michael Osterholm.

Dr Ostrom is an internationally recognized medical detective and director of the Center for

Infectious Disease Research and Policy or or Sidrapp at the University of Minnesota.

In this podcast, Dr. Ostrom draws on nearly 50 years of experience investigating

infectious disease outbreaks to provide straight talk on the latest infectious disease

and public health threats.

I'm Chris Dahl, reporter for Sidrapp News,

and I'm your host for these conversations.

Welcome back. conversations.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ostrom Update Podcast. In a recent survey conducted by researchers at the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center,

87% of the roughly 1,000 respondents

said they do everything they can

to avoid spreading seasonal illnesses.

But one-third of respondents said they don't think they need vaccines for flu or COVID-19

because they don't consider themselves at high risk for severe illness,

and that their vaccine decision doesn't affect others.

We've talked about some of the logistical issues that have

hampered the rollout of the updated COVID-19 shot, but this survey gets to a

wider problem. Whether it's COVID, flu, or respiratory since sicial virus, many people underestimate their risk of

getting severely ill from a respiratory infection. One would think that a

pandemic that killed more than a million Americans young and old might have changed

that, but apparently not so.

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