Hello?

Hi Catherine.

Are you ready to talk to me?

Mm-hmm.

I look forward to our conversations all the time.

You still do? Oh yeah. I know you said you were getting tired of me and you weren't, you know, looking forward to speaking with me anymore.

I didn't say that.

But today today today.

Today we're going to talk about what the data is telling us about what's going on and try to understand how we got into this situation where our national numbers peaked and then they were falling and now they're just like

spiking up to even worse than they were in April and we want to understand what's going

on. I mean it's very disturbing. They sort of started slightly to

slope downward nationally and then shot right back up.

I think the situation now is like why are we having this exponential surge and what does it mean?

Yeah, the virus, there's so much variability in what it does, in where it spreads, in how many people, a single person might spread it to, and how infectious, contagious you are, in what degree of disease it causes that it's

really really hard to explain from a medical level and hard to predict so the

best predictions about where we're going are coming from data.

So speaking of data, do you remember when there were these models at the beginning?

Do you remember, I think this was the IMHE model? I was really into the modeling at the

beginning because it was really helpful in understanding the scope and when we first

looked at this in March and April,

it was like this big curve up, a slow slope down,

and then flat from like late summer on.

...