He gives security in a time when there is no security: Christian Drosten’s podcast “The Coronavirus Update”. It started on February 26, 2020, when people thought it couldn’t get any worse, which, as we now know, was a mistake. Drosten’s podcast is now coming to an end – at least for the time being, the hobby virologists are now fledged and have to do without their master. The last episode of the NDR production for the time being ran on Tuesday evening, the podcast was accessed more than 140 million times in total, in which the Charité virologist spoke about the pandemic first alone and then alternately with Sandra Ciesek, also a virologist. And about what exactly?
So listen to the 112 episodes that have been released so far. The front runner is the word “virus”, which was mentioned a total of 881 times in all its glorious variants such as “coronavirus” or “viral infection”. Vaccination was also often discussed, 190 times. The “lockdown” occupied Drosten and Ciesek 70 times, the “mask” 125 times. Sure, favorite terms in the pandemic.
But above all Christian Drosten, who through the podcast something between celebrity, pandemic pope and love interest becomes personal. And felt misunderstood by the Health Minister Karl Lauterbach (mentioned four times), by the image-Newspaper, ah, the media at all. After all, there was also confidence, the word “hope” was mentioned 23 times in two years and thus about three times as often as the word image-Newspaper (eight times). The word “beer” occurs twice, right at the beginning when it came to whether “it’s okay to have a beer with friends at the pub”. And “love”, that also has to be said, Drosten mentioned exactly zero times. Maybe if he comes back in the fall. We could pretty much use them then.