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.

Today, I'm asking questions submitted by listeners to the director of the Center for Health

Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr. Tom Inglesby. Let's listen.

Thank you very much, Dr. Ingleby, for joining me

for our weekly Q&A session. How are you doing?

I am doing well. Thanks, Josh. Good to be here.

Okay, let's start with what's new this week in the world of COVID.

So let's see.

In the U.S., what's new is that it seems like we are reaching a sort of national plateau

or a peak in cases, which is good news.

And it seems like that's the case in many states around the country.

In other parts of the world, it does appear that, for example, in Spain and Italy,

that those countries appear to be a few days past peak and their cases are coming down.

It's not to say that the numbers of daily cases aren't still high in the U.S. and in those other countries, but it does seem like the social distancing measures that have been put in place in these

various countries do seem to be having a serious impact. So that's all good news. And I guess the other

thing that's new is that with that bit of good news that we might be reaching a plateau,

...