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.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call.

Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Misha Zilberman, an endocrinologist at Johns Hopkins

Suburban Hospital. They discuss the links between diabetes and COVID-19 and the concern that more

and more people are developing diabetes after they have been diagnosed with COVID-19. Let's listen.

Misha Zilberman, thanks for joining me.

It's my pleasure to be here.

So today I'd like to talk to you about COVID and diabetes.

I think I'd like to start with the fact that it appears that diabetes is a risk factor for

COVID.

And so I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about why.

So we don't know yet why diabetes is a risk factor,

but we know that patients who already have diabetes have much worse outcomes

if they have COVID-19.

There was a really important study which came from my colleagues in England,

which stated that more than 30% of patients who died in a hospital had diabetes,

...