From New York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is a Daily.

On yesterday's show, my colleague Donald G. McNeil Jr. spoke with Dr. Anthony Fauci

about the Trump era of the coronavirus. Today, with President Biden inaugurated,

vaccine distribution well underway, and multiple variants of the virus beginning to spread,

and update from Donald on the state of the pandemic.

It's Wednesday, January 27.

So, Donald, I want to start by thanking you for interviewing Dr. Fauci.

You're not a bad host, I have to say. You're pretty good host.

It's just asking the question and then shutting up.

Well, not everyone's capable of that, and I wasn't certain you were capable.

But you cut out a lot of my long stories that I would sort of wind up,

but you know, after asking the question. So, yeah. I appreciate that. You also cut out some of my

swearing, so I appreciate that too. Well, again, we really appreciate. Because your conversation

with Fauci did such a good job of establishing where we have been, and what it was like

to try to fight the virus under the previous administration, I want to talk about where we are

right now. So, describe this moment in the pandemic for us. What is happening right now? So,

we're seeing sharp declines in new cases. They're down by about 33% from

to in 60,000 a day in early January to about 170,000 now.

It's a big decline. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The decline by a third is a big deal.

So, we're seeing hospitalizations down by about 10% and we're seeing deaths down by about 10%.

Hmm. How do you explain that? Well, we've seen this before, and we've seen cases rise,

and then drop. We saw that right over Thanksgiving. We saw it right over Christmas,

...