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 asking questions submitted by listeners to Dr. Crystal Watson,

senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of

Public Health. Let's listen.

Thank you very much, Dr. Watson, for joining me today. This is an episode that we're doing every week where we ask questions that we've gotten from listeners to experts at the Center for Health Security. You're a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg School of Public Health. So your number came up this week.

Thanks for joining me. Yeah, thanks, Dr. Sharstein. I appreciate it. So first question,

what's new for people to know this week about the novel coronavirus? What do we know now that we didn't

know quite as well a week ago? Yeah, we're seeing a little bit more about the epidemiology.

We're seeing the patient load increase.

We're seeing the numbers of cases increased significantly in New York in particular.

And we're seeing hospitals struggling under the weight of that patient load.

So what we're learning this week is that what has happened in other parts of the world,

including Italy, is indeed

possible here in the U.S., and that's what we're trying to avoid.

Thanks.

Anything else that you want to mention?

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