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, it's Friday, so we are answering listener questions.

On the other end of the line is Dr. Caitlin Rivers,

senior scholar at the Center for Health Security

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Let's listen.

Dr. Rivers, thank you so much for joining me again today

to answer questions.

Before we get to our listener questions,

is there anything new this week

that you would want to call attention to?

I think the big news this week are early results from a clinical trial, a vaccine clinical trial that showed very early data showed that in eight participants, the vaccine is safe.

And that's all we can really say about it for now, but all news is good news at this point.

Great, thanks. All right, let's turn to the questions.

First, there are reports that vitamin D deficiency is correlated with severe outcomes from COVID-19.

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