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.

Roughly two years since the COVID-19 pandemic began to take off in the United States, after

five waves of infection that caused more than 79 million US COVID-19 cases in over 960,000

deaths, the nation appears to be entering a new phase of the pandemic.

Whether you call it the new normal or the next normal, or whether you even think we're

close to it yet, the discussion about what comes next and how we deal with it is well

underway.

Last week, the Biden administration laid out a plan for the road ahead.

This week, a group that includes Dr. Ostrome, members of the Biden Transition COVID-19

Advisory Board, and other experts released their own roadmap for how the country can manage

the coronavirus going forward.

The shift to the next normal should not induce complacency, inaction, or premature triumphalism.

The group wrote in the executive summary of the report, to rapidly reach and sustain the

next normal, the country must implement a comprehensive and coordinated map to both

address this pandemic and develop the capacity to confront future biosecurity threats.

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