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, we are reposting an episode about contact tracing.

Stephanie Desmond spoke to Emily Gurley and Brooke Jarrett, two epidemiologists who led the

development of a free online course for contact tracers.

This course is now available from Johns Hopkins on the Coursera platform.

The discussion covered the basics of contact tracing and why it's so important for the control of the novel coronavirus.

Let's listen.

Thanks for joining me. We're happy to be here.

About to be here.

Today we're going to talk about strategies to control community transmission of COVID.

Right now, we're currently, everybody's staying home, and that is sort of one of the bluntest

tools we have to control community transmission.

But there are other ways to do this, and one of them is to really investigate each case and see where it came from

and see where it may have been spread. Emily, can you tell me a little bit about how you do that?

So most people by now have probably heard the term contact tracing. Contact tracing refers to a public health strategy

to limit community transmission, whereby you find people in the community who are infected,

...