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 speaking with Dr. Judy Melanick, a forensic pathologist in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We talk about what the coronavirus epidemic looks like from the perspective of a medical examiner.

A warning that this podcast contains some graphic descriptions of autopsy procedures and bereavement that some listeners

may find disturbing. Let's listen. Thank you, Dr. Melanick, for joining me today. Could you just

start by explaining a little bit

what a forensic pathologist does?

A forensic pathologist is a doctor who

specializes in doing autopsies in order

to figure out why people die.

Now, why would a forensic pathologist have a special relationship to a pandemic?

There are two ways where a forensic pathologist might be involved in a response to a pandemic.

One is when someone who dies at home, for instance, because they're quarantined or because they've been

isolating themselves socially in order to protect themselves or to protect others might die

in their residence and the death is a solitary death, in which case it might not be found

right away or when they're found, there isn't

...