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 jhhu.edu for

future podcast episodes. Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith Rogers, producer, Public Health On Call.

Today, Dr. Andrew Peckosch, a virologist and professor at Johns Hopkins, returns to the

podcast to talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about all these variants, what they mean and how we can

protect ourselves. Let's listen. Dr. Peckos, it's good to see you this

morning and thanks for coming to Public Health on call. Great to be on as always. So today we're

going to talk about the COVID variance and to make it pretty simple for me, you sent me a graphic.

I'm joking because the graphic is so complicated,

and I think this graphic looks like it has a very confusing detailed lineage of about

a hundred or so variance just a BA1 and BA2. Absolutely. And throw in a little bit of BA5,

because here in the U.S. in particular, that has been the

virus variant that has been dominating here.

And you've got a real sort of absolute mess in terms of trying to keep track of which

viruses are coming from where.

And importantly, what mutations they're carrying.

So just to take a step back, I had kind of figured that there were going to be Greek letters

for the major variants, but we have sort of gone a field from that plan. What happened?

...