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 jhut.edu for future podcast episodes.

Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, producer of public health on call. One million deaths from COVID-19.

Today, our guest is Dr. Sandra Galea, Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health.

Dr. Galea speaks with Dr. Sharfstein about how we got here and what the future might hold.

His new book is The Contagion Next Time.

Let's listen.

Sandra Galea, thank you so much for joining me in public health on call.

I've just had the great experience of reading your new book, The Contagion Next

Time.

And it's a powerful exploration of the pandemic and a lot more.

And it hit me hard as the country is approaching 1 million deaths. So welcome,

and I wonder if you could talk about what that milestone means to you. Yeah, thank you,

Josh. Thank you for having me. You know, 1 million deaths is a tragedy, right? It's actually

very hard to wrap our brain around a million deaths as human. It's one of the headlines from the New York Times that I use in my presentations was from

May 25th, 2020.

And the New York Times had, in its all caps, bold, 100,000 deaths and incalculable loss.

This is when we reached 100,000.

When at the time, nobody really

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