346 - Vermont's Response to COVID-19
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2021
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Vermont has had far fewer COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths than many other states, and health commissioner Dr. Mark Levine credits a number of reasons why. Dr. Levine talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about Vermont's response to the pandemic, how the state is now addressing gaps in vaccination, and why it's so important for all decisions to be driven by data and science, not politics.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jh.edu. |
| 0:39.9 | That's public health question at jh.h.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:45.8 | Today, the podcast heads to Vermont. I speak with Dr. Mark Levine, the Commissioner of Health, |
| 0:53.2 | about the state's experience during the COVID-19 pandemic, |
| 0:58.0 | which included one of the lowest fatality rates and the highest vaccination rate in the nation. |
| 1:04.0 | Let's listen. |
| 1:05.0 | Dr. Mark Levine, thank you so much for joining us on Public Health on call. Now, you have been Commissioner of Health |
| 1:13.3 | in Vermont since when? |
| 1:15.6 | 2017. So if my date served me right, that's before the pandemic. Even though it's hard to remember, |
| 1:22.1 | you're right. Before the pandemic. So tell us about the journey that Vermont has been on with the pandemic. |
| 1:31.0 | We know that it's done pretty well relative to other states. |
| 1:34.8 | And take us back to the beginning. |
| 1:36.9 | How did the response launch? |
| 1:39.4 | Yeah. |
| 1:39.6 | So we were already having a sense of urgency and having a sense of we needed to set up our health |
| 1:47.0 | operations center, sort of mission control for managing a major disaster or catastrophe. Before March, |
| 1:55.7 | our first case appeared in the first week of March, but we had a month and a half or so of really getting ready for |
... |
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