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 has now passed 1 million cases of COVID-19 in over two months. What are your

thoughts as we hit this unfortunate milestone? Well, I think one of the things that we've learned

about this pandemic is that it's a slow, ever-moving and never-forgiving kind of situation.

The key to numbers just keep getting bigger and bigger, even though we're not talking about

necessarily the hot spots today in the United States and the way we were talking about them

three or four weeks ago. We surely are seeing hot spots in other parts of the world. Ecuador right

now appears to be leading the way that in that regard. And you know, I think that as I do these

podcasts, it becomes very easy just to become analytical and think about this as almost some kind of

a blueprint for a business or a machine. And this in every instance is about the people. It's the

cases. I actually lost another friend this week that I knew. And so I think that I hope every time

we start these podcasts, we mean to sense take a moment just to reflect on those more than

three million people. And of course, more than a million people now in the US. And as I'll come

back to this later, these numbers will never get smaller. They're only going to get bigger and

bigger. And so as we dedicate ourselves, all of us listening to this podcast, that's something we

most never, ever forget that each one of these was a loved one that big numbers surely sound big.

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