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 of 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. Caitlin Rivers, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security

at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. It's Friday, so Dr. Rivers answers a whole bunch of questions that you submitted.

Let's listen.

Dr. Rivers, thank you so much for joining me for this Friday question and answer session.

Good to be back with you.

Okay.

You ready for our listener questions?

Let's do it.

People are testing positive for the virus

for weeks or maybe even months in some cases.

What is exactly going on?

Could you still have the virus in your nasal cavity

for weeks after getting infected?

What we think happens with these situations

is that people are still shedding virus,

but they're likely not infectious.

...