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 speak with Dr. Vernon Lee, the director of the Communicable Diseases Division

of the Ministry of Health of Singapore. He is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Blueburg School

of Public Health and the Business School at Johns Hopkins.

We speak about Singapore's experience with the novel coronavirus.

Let's listen.

Dr. Lee, thank you so much for joining me.

Let's start if you could just explain what your job is in Singapore.

Thank you so much, and I'm happy to be on this call.

So I'm the director of communicable diseases at the Ministry of Health in Singapore, and my

job includes prevention, preparedness, surveillance, and response to infectious diseases across the country.

And how long have you been in that position?

I've been in this position for more than three years now.

And during that time, we have had quite a few interesting challenges due to infectious

diseases, both outbreaks that we have to deal with.

And also, we have been preparing with, and also we have been preparing

...