has been doing a lot of outreach in the community, and jessica medina, who is also assigned at department of emergency management and has been doing a lot of work. i'll start with [inaudible]. they have been hearing many questions in the community as they've been doing outreach, so we asked them to relay some of those questions with us today, so we'll start with alfini. >> hello. good afternoon, everyone. the first question that's come in from the community is why is the delta variant so deadly, and why is it so contagious compared to the original strain? >> so can you hear me now? so thank you for the question, and it's a really important one to answer as quickly as possible. we know that the variant is much more contagious than the virus we were dealing with before. as we said, it's covid on steroids, and basically, the virus has mutated so it allows the virus to bind better to our cells in our body. so basically, it has created a way to bind even more tightly to our cells and do it more quickly to infect us. so that's the key reason why delta is so concerning right now. the -- in terms