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 jhh.edu.

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

Today I'm talking to Dr. Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Center for Health

Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Dr. Rivers previously worked at the Army Public Health Center, where she was program

manager of the acute respiratory disease program. In our discussion, she speaks about the

coronavirus response strategy of trying to flatten the curve. Let's listen. Thank you, Dr. Rivers,

for joining me today.

Can you tell me what people mean when they say flatten the curve or hashtag flatten the curve?

What are they talking about?

They are talking about extending the time over which people get sick in order to make

sure that our health care capacity is able to accommodate everybody who needs care.

So if we think we are on a track to have 100 cases

just to give a little thought experiment, our first priority in public health is going to see

be to see if we can reduce that total number. So can we get it down to 90 people sick or 80 or 50?

Our second priority, though, is to expand, extend that over time. So we would rather have

100 people be sick over five weeks than we would have them be sick all at once. Because if they

...