‘This Epidemic Is Hundreds of Micro-Epidemics’
A conversation with Stanford epidemiologist Dr. Steve Goodman
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…
