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, and

I'm your host for these conversations.

Welcome to another live episode of the Oster Home Update, COVID-19, a podcast from the Center

for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. I'm your host, Chris Doll, and over the next

hour, I'll be posing your questions about the COVID-19 pandemic to Dr. Oster Home. If

you haven't already, you can send your questions to us on Twitter using the hashtag

OsterHomeUpdateLive. That's OsterHomeUpdateLive. We'll start this episode of the Oster Home Update

as we usually do with Dr. Oster Home's welcome and dedication and his views on the current

state of the pandemic. Then we'll start taking your questions and we'll try to get to

as many as possible. So Mike, the floor is yours.

Oh, thank you very much and welcome to all of you again tonight on this live podcast.

Let me just tell you as much as I do TV, you know, interviews, etc. There's something

very special about this one being live. I feel like almost I can reach through the

screen and touch many of you. So thank you very much. As I've started every podcast

and it's said every time with as much sincerity as the last time. Thank you for being with

us. We know you have lots of options to get your information and we also know that you

take a lot of time to let us know what you're thinking. I want to just thank you very

...