And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be

joined today by Mark Lipschith, Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health,

Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics there, a leading scholar, student of epidemiology generally generally but a commentator on our current

problems and the current situation and I'd say personally as someone who's followed a lot of not a scientist and not a physician

who's followed a lot of scientists and commentators I think one of the most

thoughtful and interesting so I'm looking forward to this conversation Mark

thanks for thanks for joining me thank you for me. So let's get right to it.

How bad is the situation we're in and how did we get here?

In the United States, we're in a bad situation.

And we're here, it's bad in the sense that we are in almost every part of the country seeing

growing either high or growing case numbers or both. We are at a point where the potential to reopen schools in the

in the fall is being threatened and in some places already has been made impossible by the

extent of transmission and we have lost 150,000 people or more, probably more that haven't been recorded for various reasons.

And the worst part of it all

is that much of this is self-inflicted.

We didn't cause the virus to start. We didn't,

we didn't make the situation begin the way it did, but we have really led the world in responding badly to it, in the sense that most of East Asia and most of Europe have responded much more intensely and in a

much more unified and strategic way than we have, have brought transmission under control to a large

degree, not perfectly, and they are themselves dealing with, in many cases,

resurgence as they have begun to loosen up the control measures.

But they saw a threat coming.

They responded comprehensively and built the infrastructure that needed to be built if they

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