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, I speak with Dr. Alex Buyu, the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Public Health

in the Louisiana Department of Health. We speak about the rise in cases across the South

and the West and how Louisiana's early exposure

to the virus has helped prepare for this current surge. Let's listen. Dr. Biu, thank you so much

for joining me. We're at a point right now where to your east, Florida is seeing a huge surge of

cases, to your west. you have Texas, to your

north, Arkansas. How are things going in Louisiana?

Yeah, well, even at home now, we're seeing a rise in cases, and we're seeing even

in our hospitals, more people being admitted with COVID, and in our surveillance system, we're seeing more COVID-like illness

in our emergency departments.

So what we're seeing around us is also being born here.

Where are you in terms of your curve

compared to some of these other places?

Like we're hearing about Houston running out of intensive care

unit beds.

...