From WBEZ Chicago, this is Nerdet. I'm Greta Johnson. We did it. We made it to another weekend.

And in the end of May, no less. So the pandemic is extremely not over. Is it just me or does it feel

like kind of everyone has COVID? Do we need another booster? Should we still be masking enough questions?

We're starting to pile up for us here at Nerdet that we thought we should check in with our friend

Dr. Emily Landon, or as we like to call her, Nerdet's resident epidemiologist. She's an infectious

disease specialist at the University of Chicago. Emily, welcome back. Hey, happy to be here.

Happy to have you. Not happy about the COVID numbers. Yeah, man. So yeah, I have to tell you,

we talked in I think like early March and you were like, yeah, I'm feeling good, like, you know,

masking, like let's keep doing it. This is all right. And then like two weeks later, I was in Canada

with COVID. It was a real bummer. Thank you. So I would like us to start with Deanna,

who's an internet listener who had a really good question. Let's listen to our voicemail.

Hey, Nerdet. This is Deanna in Atlanta, Georgia. You know, numbers seem relatively low

comparative to other searches, definitely going up. But at the same time, I've never known

this many people who have had COVID at the same time. So what is going on there? Are the numbers

not reflecting the reality of what we're seeing on the ground? I can completely relate to this.

I mean, last week I had a friend here in Chicago who had gotten it for the second time, a friend

in Maine who had it, friends in Colorado, friends in Alaska, like just all over the place. It felt

like more than ever before people like in my circle were sick. Yeah, I think more people than ever

may actually have COVID right now. So as is the case, as things evolve in medicine,

now that we have so many available at home rapid tests, a lot of people are choosing to use those

to get tested instead of, and then because free testing is sort of done, a lot of people are

choosing to use the at home COVID test instead of going to PCR testing. And that's great because

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