462 - Friday Q&A With Dr. Amesh Adalja
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 29 April 2022
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How did omicron numbers affect hospitalization rates? Why are positivity rates so high in some areas, and should we even pay attention to those? How accurate are rapid tests, and how forgiving are they of user error? Are our immune systems more "naive" after two years of physical distancing and masks?
Dr. Amesh Adalja from the Center for Health Security returns to the podcast to talk with Lindsay Smith Rogers and answer your questions sent to publichealthquestion@jhu.edu.
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 |
| 0:19.1 | 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 jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.1 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. |
| 0:45.5 | Today, infectious disease and critical care position, Dr. Amish Adulja, from the Center for Health |
| 0:50.4 | Security, returns to the podcast to talk with me and answer your COVID-19 questions |
| 0:55.0 | that were sent to us at public health question at jhut.edu. Let's listen. Dr. Adalja, thank you so |
| 1:01.5 | much for coming back to public health on call. It's been a while since we've had you on. How are you doing? |
| 1:05.7 | I'm good. Thanks for having me. Sure. So we're going to go through a bunch of questions today. |
| 1:10.1 | The first one is during |
| 1:12.3 | Omicron, there were a lot of people with mild or asymptomatic infections that were picked up by |
| 1:17.5 | routine surveillance in hospitals. How did that affect hospitalization numbers? So if you remember |
| 1:24.0 | during the Omicron surge, we basically had the highest number of people in the hospital. |
| 1:28.3 | But if you were working in the hospital like I was, it was very different than earlier times during the pandemic. |
| 1:33.2 | And that's because Omicron tended to be milder. |
| 1:36.0 | And a lot of people got asymptomatic infections and were admitted to the hospital for other reasons. |
| 1:40.5 | Maybe they had an orthopedic injury or maybe they were there for psychiatric reasons or |
| 1:44.4 | whatever it might have been and a lot of hospitals were routinely testing every admission for |
| 1:49.5 | COVID-19. So we had a lot of what are called incidental infections that made the numbers really high, |
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