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.hu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, I'm speaking to Dr. Derek Angus, chair of the Department of Critical Care Medicine

at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

Dr. Angus is leading an innovative international study of treatments for coronavirus infection,

called an adaptive clinical trial.

In our discussion, he explains what this means and how adaptive clinical trials can help

get answers to critical questions much faster than traditional clinical studies.

Let's listen. Dr. Angus, thank you so much for joining me. Tell me what you were doing before the pandemic. Before the pandemic, I was trying to

have a normal life. Normal for me, I'm an ICU doc. I run Critical Care at the University of Pittsburgh, and I've also had a long

interest in running clinical trials, particularly in fields such as sexes, which is quite similar to

COVID. So I understand you had already started a clinical trial for severe pneumonia. Tell me about

that study.

Sure.

So I was part of a group of experts,

or so-called experts, that were pulled together

to try to do a debrief on H1N1 10 years ago.

...