Top Epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm on the Continuing Challenges of COVID-19
Intelligence Matters
CBS News
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 22 July 2020
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode of Intelligence Matters, host Michael Morell speaks with top infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm, who is also director of the Center for Infectious Disease at the University of Minnesota, about the knowns and unknowns, to date, of COVID-19. Dr. Osterholm reviews the latest data on infection and transmission rates, the likelihood of an effective vaccine, and explains what needs to happen before contact tracing can be effective. He and Morell discuss the U.S. policy response, the need for leadership, and what other challenges remain to containing the coronavirus' spread.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, prime members, you can listen to Intelligence Matters ad-free on Amazon Music. Download the app today. |
| 0:08.4 | This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell. Brought to you by Lockheed Martin. Your mission is ours. |
| 0:18.7 | Let me ask you about testing. |
| 0:20.7 | So where are we on testing? |
| 0:23.1 | In terms of the quality of the testing, the speed at which somebody gets results, the quality of the antibody tests, |
| 0:29.9 | enough tests to go around. Can you talk about that? |
| 0:33.9 | Oh my. This is one of the big challenges and it's a source of great frustration for me. |
| 0:44.4 | Number one is we didn't have the kind of federal leadership that actually took control of this. |
| 0:48.5 | It was almost if every air traffic control tower in the country was responsible |
| 0:52.8 | singularly for getting their plane from city A to city B and nobody else was involved. |
| 0:57.2 | Imaginary traffic control looked like in this country. |
| 1:01.5 | I think the second piece of it was the oversight of testing really was challenged. |
| 1:06.6 | And we had a number of tests that came on the market that had serious, serious challenges |
| 1:11.3 | in terms of their sensitivity and specificity, how they operated. |
| 1:14.6 | To make a long story short, there are many problems with testing today that are not being addressed. |
| 1:19.4 | And I don't see anything coming down the pipe right now from the federal government level or |
| 1:23.2 | the private sector level that's going to address this. |
| 1:27.8 | We did a Winston Churchill moment. We need an FDR moment. We need to bring everyone together |
| 1:33.6 | and say this is us versus the virus. I'm not naive. I've been in this business for 45 years. I |
| 1:38.8 | understand the issue of politics and partisan nature of things. But if it was ever a time we |
| 1:45.1 | could minimize the partisan issues, whether it's about marine mass or any other aspect of opening |
| 1:52.3 | schools, how we do that. Now is the time for that. This is us versus the virus. It's not going to |
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