Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement,

and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day

through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public

health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover,

please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Craig Fugate,

the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the Obama administration.

With resources already strained and attention focused on the COVID-19 pandemic,

they discussed the dangers of adding another natural disaster, like a hurricane or a wildfire to the mix.

Let's listen.

Craig Fuget, thank you so much for joining me.

It's my pleasure.

So the COVID pandemic is upon us, and now so is the Atlantic hurricane season.

And I wanted to talk to you as someone with lots of experience with hurricanes and other natural disasters about how this coming season may be a lot worse, given the COVID pandemic we're experiencing.

Are folks, emergency managers, are they too busy to deal with a hurricane that could come this way?

No, they've been thinking about this since early spring.

I live here in Florida. I know the folks up in Florida emergency management,

and they've been actually thinking through what they're going to have to do differently with COVID as they get ready for hurricane.

So one thing I think about, I used to live in Florida myself, and I think about, you know,

...