This is Vene Cota Marty from Dallas, Texas. I have my first day as a practicing physician tomorrow.

Very nervous, but the NPR podcast has been a welcome distraction.

This podcast was recorded at 206 PM on July 7th.

Things might have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be here providing health care to Dallas.

Wow, that is impressive.

Thank you for protecting us. Hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben.

I cover politics. And I'm Kelsey Smell. I cover Congress.

Also here, Alison Aubrey, I'm with NPR Science Team.

Alison, as always, it is excellent to have you on the show.

Thanks guys. Yeah, we're happy to have you back amid some less happy circumstances. We wanted to

do a check-in with you today, because as our listeners may know, we have some big spikes in

coronavirus. We are very close to 3 million total cases of COVID-19 in the United States.

That is a scary number. More than that, we're now at a new high for new cases in a day,

which means the outbreak is spreading more quickly than ever in our country.

Alison, can you put these numbers into perspective for us? 3 million,

these tens of thousands, they can just tell them like an abstraction to a lot of people.

Sure. I mean, I guess the one way to think of it is that, as Anthony Fauci has said,

we are knee deep in the first wave. We never kind of conquered the first wave.

Wave. Now there's a resurgence in cases, well over 50,000 a day.

And every day, for the last few weeks, the seven-day rolling average of new cases,

keeps breaking records. So, I mean, deaths have declined or remained stable, as this number of

cases have soared. But some health officials fear that the downward trend in deaths, which is sort

...