413 - Rethinking the US COVID Strategy
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 4 January 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Going into 2022, what should the next phase of our COVID strategy look like? Epidemiologist Dr. Emily Gurley talks with Stephanie Desmon about how our current approach to prevent as many infections as possible is complicated, costly, and carries a lot of collateral damage. Instead, Gurley says, a focus on preventing hospitalizations and deaths could rewrite the script on our approach but it would require some difficult conversations and a strategic rethinking of the public health system.
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 jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.7 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. |
| 0:50.2 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Emily Gurley, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. |
| 0:55.9 | As we enter a new year in the pandemic, they discuss whether our strategies to prevent COVID-19 are working |
| 1:02.2 | and talk about reallocating resources to focus specifically on those at risk for hospitalization and death. |
| 1:09.5 | Let's listen. |
| 1:13.2 | Emily Gurley, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 1:19.6 | It's such a pleasure. Thank you. So I wanted to talk today about what happens in 2022. So what is sort of the next phase of our COVID strategy and how should we really be thinking about |
| 1:27.0 | this as we move on? |
| 1:28.3 | Well, I think what it looks like depends on us. |
| 1:32.3 | I think our current approach to COVID so far |
| 1:37.3 | has been to do whatever we can to prevent as many infections as possible. |
| 1:51.8 | And this has, we've done this through behavior change, masking, social distancing, through vaccinations, |
| 1:57.6 | contact tracing. |
| 2:00.1 | Those are all mainstays of our current approach. |
| 2:03.2 | But I would argue that going into 2022, we might rethink what our public health goal is. |
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