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 to Dr. Elizabeth Matsui, a professor of population health and pediatrics

at the University of Texas Delle Medical School.

Dr. Matsui is a pediatric allergist and immunologist who studies environmental exposures

and their impact on respiratory diseases. We speak about how the novel coronavirus is transmitted

through the air and what can be done to stop it. Let's listen. Dr. Mitsui, thank you so much for

joining me. I want to start with a simple question.

What is airborne spread of a virus?

So thank you for having me, and I appreciate that question.

I will say that it's not such a simple question,

but I'll try to break it down for everyone.

So essentially, that term is used interchangeably

with aerosol spread or with another term that's called droplet nuclei spread. And what people

mean by that is that there are viruses that are infectious that are in small particles that people exhale or cough or sneeze or

produce when they sing or talk that remain suspended in the air for a long time and that can travel

longer distances in the air than the larger droplets that people produce when they sneeze or cough.

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