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 about COVID-19 testing with Dr. Yuka Manabi, an infectious disease doctor at Johns Hopkins

and an expert in diagnostics. They break down the different kinds of tests, how each test works,

and what the future looks like for COVID testing. Let's listen. Yucuminaabe, thank you so much for

joining me. Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Thanks for the invitation.

So we've brought you here today because you're an expert in both infectious diseases and testing.

And something we've been hearing about a lot for the last six plus months is testing for COVID.

And I'd like you to run through with me today the different kinds of tests

there are and their pros and cons. But I'd like to start with the type of testing that was being done

or has been done at the White House, considering the outbreak that has happened at the White House.

So if you could talk to me about what are they using over there?

So the White House is using a molecular test. That is a test that looks at the RNA, part of the virus, directly. So it is a direct test to try to make more of that or amplify that particular

part of the virus, also called RNA.

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