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 Len Rubinstein, who's a core faculty member of the Center for Public

Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

A lawyer by training, he previously served as the executive director and then president of

physicians for human rights.

In our discussion, we speak about the human rights issues involved in the response to the

novel coronavirus epidemic.

Let's listen.

Professor Rubenstein, thank you so much for joining me.

This is a moment with the coronavirus outbreak where people are worried that thousands,

tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people in the United States may get very

seriously ill.

And at this difficult moment, people are thinking about all kinds of restrictions to contain the virus.

And it seems like almost every day people are proposing and enacting even more stringent restrictions in different places around the world, saying, look, we do not want to be in a position like Italy where people who need medical treatment

can't get it. At this difficult moment, what is an important human rights consideration that

is on your mind? It is, of course, really important to get this outbreak under control.

...