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, I'm speaking to Dr. Cyrus Shapar, Director of the Prevent Epidemics Team at Resolve

to Save Lives.

Dr. Shapar is an emergency department physician and former team lead of the U.S. Global Rapid Response Team

for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. We spoke about the ability to rapidly

increase medical capacity in response to the novel coronavirus. Let's listen. Dr. Shepard, thank you so

much for joining me today.

We're going to talk about medical surge, and I understand you've had some experience in your career

with the need to scale up a medical response quickly.

Could you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah, I think domestically, as an emergency physician,

working in urban medical centers,

we see an influx of patients coming in with, say,

seasonal flu at different times of year, and the hospitals have to adjust in terms of managing

the caseload. And then, you know, I worked internationally for many years for the U.S. Centers for Disease

Control, more on the public health side, but just helping governments and partners plan for an influx of cases around infectious disease events, natural disasters, and things like that.

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