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.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, Stephanie Desmond speaks to Jeremy Green and Graham Moon, two faculty at the Institute

of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University.

Their discussion focuses on the 1918 influenza pandemic and how history can inform our

response today. Let's listen. Today I'm here with Graham Mooney and Jeremy Green, medical

historians from Johns Hopkins University. With the coronavirus pandemic, we haven't seen this kind of call for social distancing,

for social isolation since the 1918 flu pandemic. We're seeing schools are closed. We're seeing

stores are closed. People are being told to stay home and stay away from other people.

How does this event compare to what we saw over 100 years ago?

Jeremy?

Thanks for bringing up that question, Stephanie.

I think that no one in our lifetime has experienced the kind of social disruption in the

name of public health that we were seeing on this scale today.

And yet, if we look back a century to the 1918-19-19 influenza pandemic, which claimed at least 50, 60 million lives, perhaps many more around the globe,

and which is killed more than 600,000 in the United

States alone, we find a set of parallels to our own experience. We know that the influenza

...