Hello, friends. Welcome back to the Bill Press pod in week six of the coronavirus shutdown,

where there's still a lot of confusion about what's really going on in our fight against this invisible enemy.

The numbers keep growing every day, now a million cases

of COVID-19 in this country and some 56,000 lives lost. It looks like there's still a long way

to go before we have it behind us, and yet some governors are acting as if the worst is already over.

Well, today we wanted to get a good factual report on exactly where we stand on the coronavirus pandemic,

and nobody has stayed on top of it better than Politico's daily morning briefing on health care politics and policy called the Politico Pulse. You may remember a few weeks ago,

we spoke with Pulse co-author Dan Diamond. Today, we join another member of the Politico Pulse

team, health care reporter, Adam Kankran. Adam, it's good to see you. Thanks for joining us

here on the Bill Press pod. Thank you for the invite. Happy to be here.

So, you know, every day we see in some areas, some signs of improvement with the coronavirus,

but also every day on the macro level, the number of cases and the number of deaths keeps growing.

So let's start out. Can you just give us some idea of exactly where we are

with this status quo? Have we peaked and have started the downhill curve, or are we still

climbing uphill? Absolutely. So by all accounts, and we are about two, two and a half to almost

three months into this, into this epidemic that quickly

became a pandemic. We are, by all accounts, past the peak that we can tell right now. So the good

news here is that we've reached a point where we no longer have to worry at this point about

health systems being overrun, about hospitals

for now not having enough hospital beds, things like ventilators, to take care of the surge of patients.

That being said, we still have a long way to go. The downslope is very far down. Last I checked,

we were at about 965,000 confirmed cases. And in the next couple of days, we're almost sure to top 1 million. And we have had more than 54,000 Americans die since February. So that in just a couple of months is more than the entire U.S. death toll of the Vietnam War. So that's where we're at.

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