095 - How New Orleans Averted Disaster from COVID-19

Public Health On Call

The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

News, Health & Fitness, Medicine

4.6 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 16 June 2020

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Early in the US outbreak of COVID-19, New Orleans was struck hard. At one point, the city of about 400,000 people was seeing up to 450 cases diagnosed per day. Today, it has reduced cases 95% from that peak. Dr. Jennifer Avegno, director of the Health Department in New Orleans, said this is due in no small part to New Orleans's history of disaster and the infrastructure and partnerships that were put in place following Hurricane Katrina. Avegno talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about how New Orleans pulled out of the tailspin, what the city continues to do to keep cases down, and why protesting is an "essential" activity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
0:12.7	Our focus is the novel coronavirus.
0:15.2	I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.
0:21.6	Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts to help you understand today's
0:26.9	news about the novel coronavirus and what it means for tomorrow.
0:30.5	If you have questions, you can email them to public health question at jhh.edu.
0:36.3	That's public health question at jh.h. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.
0:41.8	Today I speak with Dr. Jennifer Avenio, the director of the health department in New Orleans. We speak about how her city went from one of the most affected by COVID-19 to an example of how to achieve dramatic reductions in infections.
0:57.5	We also talk about how she thinks about ongoing protests against racism and police violence.
1:03.5	Let's listen.
1:04.7	So Dr. Avenio, thank you so much for joining me.
1:08.0	If you could take me back to when you first realized
1:12.7	that New Orleans was approaching a true health crisis
1:16.8	as a result of COVID-19.
1:19.4	Sure.
1:19.8	Thank you so much, Dr. Sharstein, for having me.
1:23.5	We had coronavirus on our radar since the beginning of the year.
1:27.4	We had been looking
1:28.7	at what was coming out of China. You know, New Orleans being a port city, being a destination city,
1:35.6	has seen its share of epidemics since its founding. And so we were very aware we had begun
1:43.5	making plans to do tabletop exercises to revise our
1:48.0	own pandemic plan that hadn't been updated in a couple of years.
	...

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