Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former

health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical

health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health

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

Hey listeners, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Josh Sharfstein talks again to

Sean Truelove, an assistant scientist from Johns Hopkins involved in the COVID modeling hub about the latest

predictions looking at what might happen with the Omicron wave. Let's listen. Dr. Trulov, thank you so much

for coming back to speak with us in public health on call. Now, the last time we talked, I think it

was October 1st, and we were talking about the future of the delta wave,

and you were talking about the scenario modeling hub and what was being predicted for the delta waves.

Yeah, and thanks for having me, Dr. Sharpestein. Great to be here again.

Now, if I recall, we were hopeful that by now maybe the delta wave would be subsiding. We'd be seeing much lower number of

cases. But I do remember there was a caveat you had from that model back in October.

Yeah. And that caveat that's continued to plague us is, you know, what's next is, is there going to be

another variant that emerges? And here we are. We now know there is another variant, the Omicron variant.

Yes, a word that was nowhere on our mental landscape, but it's now taken over our lives.

So you have gone through the modeling process, looking at the future of the Amicron wave.

Could you just remind me and our listeners of what that process is?

What do you do to develop these models?

Yeah.

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