432 - Fighting COVID as A Respiratory Disease
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2022
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
When will COVID become just another respiratory illness? Another way to ask that question may be: When will the response to other respiratory illnesses more closely resemble the battle against COVID? Infectious disease physician Dr. Celine Gounder talks with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about the logic of grouping SARS-CoV-2 with flu, RSV, and other respiratory pathogens. They discuss the value of common strategies to address transmission, testing, and treatment and to help prepare for future pandemics.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.1 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, Dr. Sharfstein speaks to |
| 0:47.3 | Dr. Selene Gounder, an infectious disease physician at New York University, and a senior fellow |
| 0:53.0 | and editor at large for public health at Kaiser Health News. |
| 0:56.6 | They talk about shifting our focus in 2022, from COVID to a set of respiratory diseases, |
| 1:02.5 | including COVID, influenza, and others. Let's listen. |
| 1:07.3 | Dr. Celine Gander, thank you so much for joining me on public health on call. |
| 1:13.1 | You have been such an important voice throughout the pandemic and now particularly talking about |
| 1:18.5 | why 2022 may look different than 2021. |
| 1:23.0 | Well, thank you for having me, Josh. |
| 1:24.4 | It's great to be here. |
| 1:26.1 | I think we are in a very different place now in February of 2022 than we were early in the pandemic than we were even a year ago. We have multiple highly effective and safe vaccines. About two-thirds of the population in the U.S. has now been fully vaccinated, and we're really seeing the benefits of |
| 1:45.2 | that translated into our rates of hospitalization and death. The vast majority of people ending up |
| 1:50.9 | in the hospital and dying from COVID are people who are still not yet vaccinated. At the same time, |
| 1:56.1 | our vaccination rates have plateaued, and it's hard to say how much more headway we will make in the coming months. |
| 2:03.5 | The SARS-CoB2 virus is a virus that we also have come to realize cannot be eradicated or eliminated, and that's for a few different reasons. |
| 2:13.1 | One, you have non-human hosts for this virus. |
| 2:24.3 | And then secondly, this is such a highly infectious virus with such a short incubation period. Some of the strategies that were used to eradicate infections like smallpox, for example, are simply not going to be feasible. |
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