Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to Public Health Question at jh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Josh Sharfstein, a brief announcement.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced the terms

epidemiology and outbreak response to new audiences. If you have become interested in a career

detecting, investigating, or analyzing data from outbreaks, you can now take a free course

to learn more on the Coursera platform from Johns Hopkins.

Go to Coursera.org and type in investigating epidemics like COVID-19 and analyst's guide.

That's investigating epidemics like COVID-19 and analyst's guide.

Today, we return to the topic of masks and COVID. I catch up on the latest reports with

Johns Hopkins Professor and Infectious Disease Epidemiologist Dr. David Dowdy. Let's listen.

David Dowdy, thank you so much for joining me on Public Health On Call to talk about masks and COVID again.

Thanks so much, for having me, Josh.

So we thought it would be a good idea to cover this topic when there was a whole other round of headlines about masks and COVID.

And people like my mom were calling me saying, maybe I should never have worn a mask the entire

pandemic. Is that right? I don't know whether you've seen these headlines or you've heard about

what people are talking about. Yeah, so I've certainly seen the headlines. I think it's easy

to misinterpret those headlines as thinking that the science has somehow changed. I think the

important thing for people to realize is that

masks still work. They always have worked. It's just that you have to use the right masks and wear

...