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 talking to Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, senior scholar at the Center for Health Security

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Just as she did a couple weeks ago, Dr. Nuzzo has agreed to answer questions that have been coming in about the novel coronavirus. Let's listen.

Thank you, Dr. Nozo, for joining me again today. First, I just want to ask what has struck you as new and important in this week's news about the coronavirus?

There's a few things that happen this week.

One is that the whole notion of testing has become a bit of a part of the national

conversation.

There have been lots of debates at the political level as to how much testing is necessary

and whether we need to even expand our testing at all.

It was frequent subject of President's Coronavirus Task Force meetings.

We heard stories of governors

trying to import tests from other countries

and a president unhappy with that.

So testing this week has been an interesting conversation in the political realm.

And what's your view on that?

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