Member-only story

‘This Epidemic Is Hundreds of Micro-Epidemics’

A conversation with Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Steve Goodman

David Goodman
Elemental
7 min readJan 4, 2021

--

Image: Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images

Back in March when the Covid-19 outbreak was in its early days, I asked my brother Steve to join me on The Vermont Conversation, a radio show and podcast that I host, to talk about what we could expect with this new virus. Steve Goodman, MD, MHS, PhD, is an associate dean at Stanford Medical School, where he is also a professor of epidemiology and population health and of medicine. When we spoke in March, Steve described the coronavirus as a tsunami about to overwhelm us. His words were prescient: nine months later, over 350,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and at least 20 million people have been infected. Vermont, where I live, once an outlier with few Covid infections, now averages about 100 new cases and several deaths per day.

I asked Steve for his thoughts on the Year of the Pandemic: where we are, how we got here, and how it ends. We spoke on December 30, 2020; you can hear our full discussion on the Vermont Conversation podcast. This partial transcript has been…

--

--

Elemental
Elemental

Published in Elemental

Elemental is a former publication from Medium for science-backed health and wellness coverage. Currently inactive and not taking submissions.

David Goodman
David Goodman

Written by David Goodman

NYT bestselling author. Journalist. Skier. Host, The Vermont Conversation podcast at VTDigger.org. www.dgoodman.net

No responses yet