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.

Last week on the Oster Home Update podcast, Dr. Oster Home envisioned the coming weeks and months

of the COVID-19 pandemic as a four chapter story, with each chapter addressing our current mindset

and the different challenges facing us. This week, we're going to continue on our literary theme,

this time using the analogy of a three-act play. The first act of the pandemic play saw the

introduction of the novel coronavirus, the first wave of infections and lockdowns, and a premature

reopening as people thought that the worst was behind us. The second act was marked by a big summer

wave of infections, followed by an even worse wave in the fall and early winter that saw unprecedented

numbers of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths. Then, two new plot points, COVID-19 vaccines,

and dangerous coronavirus variants, were introduced at the end of Act 2. And now we're in the

second intermission, waiting to see how those two plot points play out. It's an imperfect

analogy, but on this March 11th episode of the Oster Home Update, we'll be exploring how this

third act of the COVID-19 pandemic may unfold, looking at how those two key plot points,

the vaccines and the variants, will affect the storyline. Within this discussion, we'll also talk

about the CDC's recent guidelines on what fully vaccinated people can do, and look at how

vaccine inequity could extend the third act to the pandemic. We'll also answer a listener email

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