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, the US is now more than 572,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases,

and over 23,000 deaths. Are you seeing anything in the data that indicates the country is nearing

an apex in this initial wave? Well, first of all, Chris, I think it's really important to understand

as we have said time and time again, this is a marathon out of sprint. And while it seems like

we've been dealing with this virus for many, many years, practice just been several months, and in

this country really, it earns only about six weeks. If one looks at where we're at right now,

in terms of this entire pandemic plane out, I'm reminded of the quote by Sir Winston Churchill,

who once said, this is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end, but rather this is

the end of the beginning. And I think that quote really aptly describes what we're at in terms of

what might happen. Several points of information support that. Number one is that as a respiratory

transmitted pathogen, and one that is surely what I would call highly infectious, there's no

reason to think that this is not going to continue to circulate in human populations around the

world until it has basically one of two things. Either sufficiently saturated the human population

with infection, including serious illnesses and deaths, and then resulted in the kind of acquired

immunity that may approach 55 to 70 percent of the number likely that we would need before we

would see slowing down a transmission, or we have a vaccine. So assuming that this is going to

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