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. Lisa Cooper, Professor at Johns Hopkins in the schools of medicine,

nursing, and public health, and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity.

Our discussion centers on the challenges that the

coronavirus pandemic poses to vulnerable populations. We also discuss how the field of health equity

is critically relevant to informing the public health and medical response. Let's listen.

Dr. Cooper, thanks so much for joining me. You have spent your career studying equity and health.

And now we have a pandemic where it's very clear that the illnesses and the challenges

are affecting different people in different ways.

From your vantage point, what's really important for people to know?

Well, I think it's really important for people to know that there are certain groups in our society

that are at much higher risk of doing poorly during this pandemic, you know, that we are all at risk,

but we have certain groups of people who, because they are

already at risk for poor health, who will actually end up facing a lot more struggles to

stay healthy at this time. So who's on that list of groups that you're particularly worried about?

So this list, of course, includes older persons, as we've heard a lot about. It includes

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