Hello and welcome to the Oster Home Update, COVID-19, a weekly podcast on the COVID-19

pandemic with Dr. Michael Oster Home. Dr. Oster Home 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. Oster Home 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 Doll, reporter for CITRAP News. I'm

your host for these conversations. Mike, since we last spoke, the number of COVID-19 cases

and deaths in the U.S. has continued to grow exponentially, with more than 400,000 confirmed

cases and 13,000 deaths. What's your assessment of where we are in this pandemic?

Well, thank you, Chris. I think it's a very sobering note to think that these numbers of cases,

which clearly reflect loved ones, kind of friends, family, are in, while enormous in size,

they are just the beginning of what we're about to experience. We take a step back and think

about a pandemic of a respiratory pathogen like this. The one that obviously comes to mind

first and foremost is influenza. And so far that this particular coronavirus has acted

from a transmission standpoint, virtually identical to what we'd expect to see with an

influenza virus, and is why we've been able to track it and predict it as well as we have.

I think most of the audience may be aware of the fact that we actually, on January 20th,

wrote a piece that declared that this would, in fact, be a global pandemic. And on February

3rd, actually even laid out the fact that based on the amount of time it would take once introduced

into a given area of the world for the number of generations of transmission, where cases would be

doubling with each generation or time from infection until being infectious, would take about a

month to a month and a half. We actually suggested that by the last week of February,

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