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.

It's Friday. So today I'm asking an expert at the Center for Health Security at the Johns

Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health some questions submitted by our listeners to our

email address, public health question at jhhu.edu.

Our respondent is Dr. Amish Amalja, senior scholar at the center. He's also a physician trained

in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious disease, and critical care. Let's listen.

Dr. Adalja, thank you so much for joining me today. Now, I know you're a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, but you're also a physician trained in internal medicine, emergency medicine, infectious disease, and critical care. So how have you been spending your days lately? So it's been a bit of a mix. There's some days that I'm rounding on the infectious disease service taking care of patients with coronaviruses and also answering questions about coronavirus from all corners of the hospital. Sometimes I'm doing a night shift in the ICU, taking care of patients with critical illness from coronavirus as well as other critically ill patients. And then there's been some ER shifts

where I've worked as well. In the mix between all of that, I'm working on things at the Center for

Health Security coming up with project ideas related to the coronavirus and doing a lot of media

on this topic. Well, I can only imagine how busy you are. So I really appreciate your time.

So we'll jump in. We've been taking questions through

our email address, public health question at jhu.edu. Are you ready? Yep. Okay. The first one is,

what's new this week? What have we learned this week about the novel coronavirus? Well,

we've learned that there are ways that social distancing can work and that we've seen some benefit of that.

For example, in New York City where hospitalization rates have been decreasing where case counts may be coming down.

And that shows that social distancing, when executed properly, can do what it's intended to do and decrease the intensity of transmission.

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