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. Stephen Patrick, a pediatrician at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

They discuss what the Delta variant means for kids, in schools and in hospitals, and his frustration

with the lack of cooperation from community leaders who could help turn the tide on COVID,

but won't. Let's listen. Stephen Patrick, thanks so much for joining me.

It's great to be here today.

So most of this pandemic, we have focused on adults, which has made sense because they're

the group that's been at the highest risk.

And you're a pediatrician in Tennessee, and now we're seeing that kids are really effective.

So talk to me about that and what we need to do.

It really has been an extraordinary journey that we've had.

For the first part of the pandemic, we focused a lot on adults, and rightly so.

They were the ones at the highest risk of death.

But we prioritize many of our own activities over schools. And what we saw in the early parts of the pandemic is that kids really

suffered as a part of it. We saw rising rates of food insecurity, loss of health insurance,

...