002 - Understanding the Spread of COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 4 March 2020
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Dr. Josh Sharfstein interviews infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Justin Lessler on the features of viruses that lead to worldwide contagion, how COVID-19 compares with the flu in terms of speed, and where the evidence now points for this novel coronavirus.
Dr. Justin Lessler is an Associate Professor in Epidemiology. Dr. Josh Sharfstein is the Vice Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and former secretary of Maryland's Department of Health.
More information: jhsph.edu/covid-19
KEYWORDS: asymptomatic, influenza, transmission
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:12.3 | Our focus is COVID-19, the novel coronavirus. |
| 0:16.3 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member of Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's |
| 0:21.5 | health department. Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand |
| 0:27.5 | today's news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow. If you have questions, |
| 0:32.7 | you can email them to public health question at jh.h.edu. That's public health question at jh.h.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:43.4 | Today, I'm talking to Dr. Justin Lesler, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:49.1 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. Dr. Lesler is one of the world's experts on how viruses move through populations, |
| 0:56.3 | and in this discussion, he speaks about how he sizes up the novel coronavirus. Let's listen. |
| 1:03.1 | Tell me a little bit about what you do as an infectious disease epidemiologist. Yeah, so I study |
| 1:09.2 | how infectious diseases move through populations. |
| 1:12.6 | Specifically what I do is I study infectious disease dynamics, which is the study of how diseases |
| 1:18.3 | transmit, how they develop in people over time and space. |
| 1:21.8 | So give me a few infectious diseases that you've studied over time. |
| 1:25.7 | So I started out working mostly on influenza, the flu, which I still study today. |
| 1:31.6 | And I've also worked a lot on cholera, which is the biggest part of my current work. |
| 1:36.6 | But then also I tend to get involved in emerging infections as they come along. |
| 1:42.0 | So the current novel coronavirus, of course, I worked on |
| 1:46.8 | pandemic H1N1 back in 2009. So I have this very intense interest in emerging infections. |
| 1:54.9 | Great. So governments might call you, for example. Yes, we've worked with governments. We've |
| 1:59.5 | worked with public health agencies, |
| 2:02.4 | worked with other institutions. Both national and global. Yes. So let's talk about coronavirus. |
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