I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, March 19th.

Right now, the race between vaccines and variants continues, as we all know, while we're learning about how the virus works

and how to protect ourselves against it. It is also learning in its way about how we work

and how to protect itself from our efforts to avoid it. Dr. Daniel Griffin has been on the

front lines of the pandemic with his patients and advising other doctors

as an infectious disease clinician and as a researcher at Columbia and chief of the Division

of Infectious Diseases at the ProHealth Medical Group. Dr. Griffin, thank you for joining us.

Welcome to WNYC. Oh, thank you so much for having me, Brian. And so has your

role been primarily to treat patients once they're sick enough with COVID to be in the hospital?

You know, Brian, I think that's hopefully what I can bring to this. I always refer to myself as a

physician scientist, physician first, and I've been

taking care of, well, hundreds and hundreds of COVID patients. But the whole spectrum, Brian,

from the outpatient setting all the way into the hospital, into the ICU, and then out the other

side. So I'm curious what you're seeing in your practice and in particular what you see

and what you hear from other doctors at pro-health when it comes to hospitalization and ICU's.

Are we winning this war? You know, right now we're sort of in a holding game, I think. We're sitting here on this plateau and we say it's a, you know, the virus against the vaccines.

And as we're ramping up our vaccines, we're doing everything we can, unfortunately, to help

the virus with the opening up.

Some of us think a little bit too quickly.

But we're sitting at this holding pattern.

And people can look at the numbers nationally and in the New York area. We see it and hear it.

We're sitting with about 4,000 to 5,000 people in the hospital. And we've been there for about

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