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 speak to Dr. Karen Carroll, the director of the Division of Medical Microbiology

at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

We take a look behind the scenes of testing for the novel coronavirus. Let's listen.

Dr. Carol, thank you so much for joining me. You are the head of the Johns Hopkins Microbiology Lab.

And so tell me what it was like in the early days of COVID-19.

So in the early days, we knew that we were going to have to offer testing for not only the Johns Hopkins Hospital, but also the Johns Hopkins medical system.

And we decided to attempt to initially acquire reagents through the Centers for Disease Control.

But that was not an option for us.

And so once the FDA allowed academic medical centers to develop their own tests under the FDA

emergency use authorization rules, we set about to design our own assay.

So people hear about that, that academic you know, academic medical centers like Johns Hopkins,

you know, just set up their tests, but it's not that simple, is it?

What did you actually have to do?

The first thing we had to do is we had to obtain genetic control material so that we could make the appropriate controls and then also actually

design the components of the test.

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