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 Lindsay Smith Rogers, and today we welcome back Caitlin Jedalina, publisher of your local epidemiologist, to talk

about updates in COVID research. We discussed the effectiveness of the most recently updated

COVID vaccines against severe disease and long COVID, how people can think about their risks

of getting COVID, what we know about when you might be most infectious, seasonality, and more.

Let's listen.

Caitlin Jedalina, thank you so much for coming back on to public health on call.

It's good to see you.

Yeah, thanks for having me again.

Excited to be here.

So today, we're going to talk about COVID, actually.

You recently sent out a COVID research roundup through your email, your local

epidemiologist. We're four years into this, and there's still ongoing research that's helping us

better understand infections. We're also watching these things change in real time. So we're just

going to go through an overview today of where we are on some key points. Let's start with the updated COVID vaccines, the ones that we all got

in the fall. What do we know about these vaccines? Or hopefully got. Or I hopefully got.

You know, so with the COVID vaccine, we really took the flu model in that we have to have a

proactive response to try to get ahead of this vaccine. We kind of have to guess where it's going.

And because of that, we're dependent on some lab data and some human data to make that decision

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