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 jhh.edu.

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

Harassment online.

Harassment in person.

Threats of violence and even violence itself.

In the last year amid the pandemic, public health workers have experienced more direct attacks

than at any time in the previous century.

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

This week, as part of National Public Health Week, we're bringing you a special four-part series with episodes excerpted from a webcast from last month.

The webcast was produced in collaboration with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, known as Asto,

the National Association of County and City Health Officials, known as NACO, and the Big Cities Health Coalition.

In this series, we will explore the extraordinary challenges facing the field of public health in the COVID era.

We'll hear from health officers on the front lines about their experiences, from researchers about the scale of the problem, and from the leaders

of Asto, NACO, and the Big Cities Health Coalition about what is to be done.

In our final episode of this series, we'll hear more about how serious the problems are

and what can be done about them. We'll hear from Lori Freeman, the CEO of NACO,

...