Welcome to Season 4 of 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 Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging 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.edu.

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

Today, I speak to Dr. Emily Martin, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of

Michigan School of Public Health. Our topic is how COVID-19

in young people is changing as the virus is mutating and variants are spreading. Let's listen.

Dr. Emily Martin, thank you so much for joining me to talk about the changing epidemiology of COVID infections among young people.

And maybe we should start at the beginning with how this disease looked like it was affecting

young people for a very long time.

Absolutely. Well, at the beginning, it looked like it affected young people almost not at all.

There were a lot of debates about whether, especially the youngest children, could even get infected in the first place.

And we certainly weren't seeing any even moderate disease. We were saying very few hospitalizations in young people.

And that even extended up into,

if you look at the middle school age range, even high schoolers, young teens, we were seeing very

little at the beginning of the epidemic. What about among young adults? Young adults were where

things really changed. And we saw, especially, you know, if you look at, um, uh, young 20s,

older teens, those populations, college age populations, we saw a ton of transmission going on

there. Um, and as in, um, you know, those infections tended to be milder than older adults,

...