Mpr News With Kerri Miller

When the next pandemic hits, will we be ready?That’s the question at the center of University of Minnesota epidemiologist Mike Osterholm’s new book, “The Big One.” And his answer is sobering.Osterholm joined Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas for a blunt and personal assessment of what went right and what went wrong during the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s insistent that if we don’t learn the lessons of the last pandemic, we will be even less prepared for the next one.Here are five key takeaways from their conversation.1. Public health communication can’t just be factual.Osterholm is the founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and has decades of experience tracking and researching outbreaks. He said the big lesson for public health leaders is that kindness and humility have to be forefront as they communicate.Humility is important, he told Miller, because “people mistakenly think that science is truth. It’s not. Science is the pursu