Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's

news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhhhue.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today I'm talking to Dr. Andrew Peckosch, professor of molecular microbiology and

immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Peckosch has studied a great number of viruses in the laboratory,

including influenza and SARS. In our discussion, he talks about the critical questions to answer

about the novel coronavirus. Let's listen. Professor Peckos, thanks so much for joining me.

My pleasure. So you are a virologist. Can you tell me what a

virologist does? Sure. So in the simplest definition is a biologist is someone who studies

viruses and how they replicate. In my particular case, I've been very interested in viruses that

cause respiratory disease. And so I've been working on influenza, SARS,

and various other respiratory viruses,

trying to understand how they get in and replicating people

and how they initiate the process of disease.

So tell me a little bit about your laboratory.

What do you do in a virus lab?

So here at the Bloomberg School Public Health,

...