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, Stephanie Desmond talks to Crystal Watson of the Center for Health Security

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

They discuss a tried and true method of slowing the spread of infections using contact tracers and how ramping up to 100% of Public Health. They discuss a tried and true method of slowing the spread of infections

using contact tracers and how ramping up to 100,000 of these disease detectives nationwide

could allow us to slow the spread of coronavirus. Let's listen. Thank you so much for joining me.

Thanks a lot. First, let's define contact tracing.

Sure. This is a core tool of public health. This is not something new that we're just inventing

now. This has been used for decades, perhaps centuries, to identify people who are sick, to isolate

them at home if they have an infectious disease so that

they don't spread it to others, but then also to identify who they've been in close contact with

over the period that they've had symptoms. So that will help us contact those people,

ask them to stay in quarantine for the duration of the incubation

period for the virus, and monitor themselves for symptoms. So in essence, what this does

is this allows us to begin breaking chains of transmission. So if those quarantined individuals

are staying at home for 14 days, then they, in theory,

...