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. Jennifer Nuzzo,

senior scholar at the Center for Health Security

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Just as she did a couple weeks ago,

Dr. Nuzzo has agreed to answer questions that have

been coming in about the novel coronavirus. Let's listen. Dr. Nozo, thank you very much for

joining me. Today I'm going to ask you some questions that have come in through the email

public health question at jh.hu.edu. So the first question is, why is the world's response to COVID-19 so much more severe than the

response to other outbreaks like H1N1 or SARS?

It's a great question.

One thing is that this is a different virus.

What we've learned so far about this virus is that it's

more easily transmitted than SARS was. The epidemic that happened in 2003 was due to SARS. And

then we learned that people were able to transmit their infection most likely when they were

...