162 - Mayor Walt Maddox on Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama, and COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2020
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The University of Alabama saw some 2,000 cases of COVID-19 within the first few weeks of students returning to campus. Walt Maddox, mayor of Tuscaloosa and dad to an Alabama freshman, talks with Stephanie Desmon about how intertwined his city is with the university and how town and gown have had to work together to implement public policies to stem the spread. Maddox also talks about the economic impact COVID-19 has had both on the school and the city, and how all decision making has been rooted in public safety, logic, data, and science.
KEYWORDS: young adults; student life; college
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.7 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health |
| 0:32.7 | officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at |
| 0:39.8 | Public Health Question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast |
| 0:47.8 | episodes. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Walt Maddox, the mayor of Tuscaloosa, home to the University of Alabama. |
| 0:56.9 | They discuss how intertwined his city is with the university and how COVID-19 has permeated |
| 1:02.8 | every part of that relationship, especially when 2,000 students were diagnosed in the first |
| 1:09.2 | weeks of school. Let's listen. Mayor Walt Maddox, |
| 1:13.7 | thanks so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. So as the mayor of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, |
| 1:18.9 | where the University of Alabama sits, you have seen the university open, and then very quickly |
| 1:25.2 | they had 2,000 cases of coronavirus. I'd like to know a little bit about |
| 1:31.3 | how that has impacted you and the decisions that you've made as a result. Well, it certainly |
| 1:37.2 | impacted me as a father. My daughter Taylor goes to the University of Alabama and so is in her |
| 1:41.7 | freshman year and lives on campus. So as a father, you certainly think about all those things. As a mayor, it's really impacted public policy because |
| 1:48.7 | how do we work with the university to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus? When we had the re-entry |
| 1:55.0 | testing take place before students arrived in mass, less than 300 tested positive. Coming back on campus within the first |
| 2:02.6 | week, we saw high levels of students becoming infected with the coronavirus. When we looked at the |
| 2:07.8 | contact tracing data that the university provided, it was happening really in two places. One was |
| 2:13.4 | on campus housing, no surprise. But the second was in megabars that are adjacent to the |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.