Hello and welcome to the Ostrome Update COVID-19, a podcast on the COVID-19 pandemic with

Dr. Michael Ostrome.

Dr. Ostrome 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. Ostrome 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 Dahl, reporter for CITRAP News, and I'm your host for these conversations.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Ostrome Update Podcast.

As the world enters a new year, we are once again confronting a new, challenging phase

of the pandemic that just won't go away.

It was just over a month ago that news broke of a coronavirus variant identified in South

Africa that appeared to be both highly transmissible and capable of evading some of our vaccine-derived

immunity.

Now, that variant has spread around the world and is causing a massive wave of infections

in every community it touches.

The good news is that the Omicron variant does appear to cause less severe illness, and

we will explore that further in this episode of the podcast.

But the sheer volume of infections we are starting to see, and we'll continue to see for

the next few weeks, is likely to push our hospitals and many of the other institutions

we rely on to the brink, and how that all plays out remains to be seen.

This week on the podcast, we're going to discuss the impact that Omicron is having both

here in the United States and elsewhere, and what these next few weeks might look like.

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