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..u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, Stephanie Desmond speaks to Dr. James Fick, the head of orthopedic surgery at the Johns

Hopkins Hospital and a former Army colonel. They discuss Fixed work drawing on his military career

to set up Maryland's field hospital for COVID-19 patients

at the Baltimore Convention Center.

Let's listen.

Dr. Fickey, thank you so much for joining me.

It's my pleasure, Stephanie. Thank you.

So this is an unusual operation to set up a field

hospital in a convention center in the middle of the city. But you have experience in the Army

setting up field hospitals quickly. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Well, sure. I think we're in

unusual times. And so I will tell you, I came to Johns Hopkins in 2013. I was in the military

for about 30 years. Fortunately, had my medical training, but also a lot of leadership training.

And I ended up having the privilege of leading a combat support hospital, which is now

what the Army refers to as a field hospital in northern Iraq in 2005.

And we had essentially a 250-bed facility that was at the head of the airfield up in Mosul.

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