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 jhhhu.edu.

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

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of Public Health On Call. Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to

Dr. Tara Kirksell about the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and the threat

of COVID-19. She's in a unique position to discuss this. Not only is she a Johns Hopkins

public health security expert, but she was a silver medalist in swimming at the 2004 Olympics in Athens.

Let's listen. Tara Kirksell, thanks so much for joining me.

Thanks for having me here.

So you really bring a unique perspective.

Today I want to talk about the Tokyo Olympics and COVID,

and you are an Olympic silver medalist from 2004,

and you are a public health expert.

So you really bring both worlds here,

and so I'm glad to be able to talk to

you today. Yeah, this summer is the ultimate collision of my two careers. Before I was a,

before I was in the school of public health and before I was a public health professor, I was,

you know, a professional athlete and spent a lot of time doing that

...