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.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Oster Home Update podcast. This is the 57th

episode of our podcast on the COVID-19 pandemic and will be the last of our weekly episodes.

But don't worry, we will still be here every other week to provide insight and analysis on the

pandemic to answer your questions, to share some pandemic acts of kindness, and to continue calling

Boston Strikes. And we'll still be posting the podcast on Thursday mornings. This week on the

podcast, we're going to focus on some of the big lingering questions that remain as cases continue

to drop here in the United States and some glimmeries of a global decline start to emerge.

Among those questions are how much of a threat is posed by the B-1617 variant that first emerged

in India and is now taken hold in the United Kingdom. We'll also discuss the continuing

controversy over the origins of the coronavirus, concerns about the upcoming Tokyo Olympics,

and answer some listener questions about breakthrough infections and risk assessment in the

wake of the CDC's new mask guidance. But first, as always, we'll begin with Dr. Oster Home's

opening comments and dedication.

Well, thank you, Chris, and welcome to everyone again to another episode of our podcast.

We are so pleased that you could join us. And as I say, week after week,

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