Welcome to Season 3, a Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh 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 jh.h.edu.

That's public health question at jh.h.u.org for future podcast episodes.

Today, I speak to Professor Andy Peckosch of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health about the UK variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

We talk about what this variant is, why it may be more contagious, and what each of us can do.

Let's listen.

Dr. Peckos, thank you so much for talking to me about the new variant that is captured the world detention with respect to COVID-19.

Could we just start with you explaining what this variant is?

Yeah, so this particular variant was detected in England, and it initially was a very interesting virus because it contains about 14 changes in its genome.

And that is an incredibly high number compared to other strains, other lineages of SARS-CoV-2

that are circulating right now.

This virus mutates at a relatively slow rate.

So seeing so many mutations in one virus was a real sort of bellwether to say, okay, something's

going on here.

We need to pay more attention to this.

As the public health authorities in England started to sequence more viruses,

they realized that this variant was actually becoming one of the dominant lineages of the virus in England,

meaning that it was spreading faster than versions of the virus

...