Hello NPR politics listeners. I'm Darren from Sydney, Australia. It's 3am in the morning

and I'm in my garbage truck collecting food waste from local businesses to take it for

composting. There's nothing I enjoy more at this time of the morning than a hot cup of

coffee and catching up on US politics with my friends from NPR. This podcast was recorded

out. 206 p.m. on September 3rd 2020. Things may have changed by the time you listen to this.

Okay, here's the show. That is fantastic. Nice, so he's collecting garbage, but he likes

listening to us. For composting, no less. I love that. Hey there, it is the NPR politics

podcast. I am Danielle Kurtzleben, I cover politics.

I'm Aysir Asuka, I cover the White House. And we have a special guest today. We have

Alison Aubrey from NPR Science Desk. Hey, welcome Alison.

Thanks for having me. We are overdue for a coronavirus check-in. We realized which is why we have

you here. So let's get started. Let's start with the basics with the numbers surrounding

coronavirus. And at least at a glance to me, a non-expert on this, they look pretty grim.

But we have a 6 million Americans who have been diagnosed with the disease and 185,000

who have died. So, tell us, Alison, what does the trend surrounding those numbers look

like? Well, you know, the big picture is that the number of new cases are declining. I

mean, we still have about 40,000 new cases a day. That's the average of her the last week.

So a lot of people, but that is significantly less than the nearly 60,000 people a day

documented back in July. So that's actually good news. Public health experts say it's also

encouraging that hospitalizations are declining, deaths are declining a bit compared to previous

weeks. But look, there's still a concern about regions where cases have been on the rise.

There are spots in the Midwest, for instance, in Kansas, the Dakotas, and in Iowa.

...