Welcome to 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.

Our goal is to bring evidence and experience

to illuminate critical public 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 jh.hu.edu

for future podcast episodes.

Today, it's a Friday Q&A episode. I speak with Dr. Crystal Watson, senior scholar

at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

We talk about COVID and even a little bit

about monkeypox.

Let's listen. Dr. Watson, it's great to have you back on the podcast. How are you doing?

Thanks. It's great to be here, doing pretty well.

Glad to be in the summertime.

Yeah, we're in the summertime,

and it seems like for the moment that we're on the holding steady at a relatively low rate compared

to the last couple years of COVID. How do you see things now? Yeah, I think we're in a much better place, obviously, than we were last year, even going into last summer,

where we were seeing the emergence of the Delta variant.

We are still dealing with Omicron and it's sub-variants, and we're probably looking at somewhat of a surge in the coming weeks from the

...