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, Colleen Berry, the chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at

the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, talks with Dr. Vivek Murthy, currently

a distinguished policy scholar at Johns Hopkins

and the 19th Surgeon General of the United States. They discuss loneliness, human connection, and COVID-19.

Let's listen. Vivac, thank you so much for joining me today.

When did you first start thinking about loneliness as a public health issue?

Well, Colleen, it's good to be with you today as well.

I started thinking about loneliness when I was at the very beginning of my tenure, a surgeon general.

When I began seeing in so many of the stories I was hearing across the country,

these threads of loneliness that were unexpected. And I would hear people say to me,

I feel like I have all these burdens in my life that I have to carry by myself. Or I feel if I

disappear tomorrow, no one would even notice, or I feel invisible.

And hearing that again and again, it became clear to me that this was more than just a one-off phenomenon, but this was a pattern.

It was a pattern that reminded me of two things. One was my own personal experiences, struggling with loneliness as a child, and then later at many

points during adulthood. But it also reminded me of my experiences in medicine, taking care of

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