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>> Hello, everyone.  I'm Abby Carlson.  I'm an infectious diseases doctor here at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.  And welcome to Project Firstline's new video blog.  On this blog, we are going to be explaining some of the basic ideas behind infection control, why they work for COVID-19, and then how they work to protect you and your patients, your coworkers, and your community.  To start off with, a little bit about myself.  Up until a few months ago, I, like many of you, was working in a hospital.  I was part of an infection control team and I was also working as a doctor, caring for patients.  And as you know, it's been almost a year now since the beginning of this pandemic.  For those of us in healthcare, it has been a year filled with a lot of change and a lot of challenges.  We've encountered situations that were seemingly impossible.  They were new, they were stressful, and quite frankly, they were scary and traumatic.  We're doing so many things differently now because of COVID-19, from screening patients and employees at the entrances to wearing masks all the time when we're at work.  These changes can be overwhelming to all of us.  And we may not always understand why we're doing certain things that we're doing or why those things matter for stopping the spread of the pandemic.  
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Let's be honest, there are a lot of infection control recommendations for COVID-19.  There is a lot to do.  And it is really important that we do it right.  We here at Project Firstline are here to help with that.  We want you to understand not just what you're doing to control COVID-19 but really why you're doing it.  That's because we believe that you can do your job best when you understand why you're doing what you're doing.  
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So before we get into the why, it helps to first think about what we're trying to do with infection control.  The ultimate goal of everything we do in infection control for any disease is to keep people from getting sick.  In this case, to keep people from getting sick with COVID-19.  Obviously, we don't have our patients to get sick when they come to see us for care.  But it's equally as important that they don't make us sick as we're providing care.  And just as importantly, we don't want to make our colleagues and coworkers sick as we work together.  We want this to be a safe process for all.  We're in healthcare because we want to help people.  That job is more important now than ever.  And we all recognize that there's some risk of infection in going to work during a pandemic.  So the goal of CDC's infection control recommendations is to protect you and everyone in the healthcare facility from getting infected while you're making sure your patients have the essential care that they need.  Our goal here at Project Firstline is to make sure that you have the infection control knowledge that you need and deserve to keep yourself, your patients, your colleagues, and your community safe.  In our next video, we're going to be discussing SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 -- two terms that we hear a lot but we don't always know what the difference is between the two of them.  So we're going to go into that in our next video blog.  Please be sure to follow us at Facebook and Twitter to get our update, or check us out on the web at CDC.GOV/ProjectFirstline.  We'll see you all at the next episode.