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.edu

for future podcast episodes.

Today, Paul Spiegel, professor of the practice

and director of the Center for Humanitarian Health

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

speaks with John Barry, the noted historian

and the author of the Great

Influenza. Their conversation centers on the lessons of the 1918 pandemic for today's

response to coronavirus. Let's listen.

John Barry, it's such a pleasure to have you today on this podcast.

Recently you published a New York Times opinion piece

where you said the single most important lesson from the 1918 influenza was that containment failed.

Can you talk a little bit about what you meant there? Well, in 1918, of course, there actually

was no effort to contain.

Influenza would be probably impossible to really contain because the incubation period is much shorter than coronavirus.

This roughly 48 hours is the average incubation period for influenza.

...