Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City.

Our goal is to bring

scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews

with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more.

If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at 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 of public health on call.

Today, we are again turning the podcast over to our guest host, Dan Gorenstein, a longtime health reporter and host of the podcast tradeoffs.

The topic today is how the pandemic has affected the public health workforce.

During the pandemic, more than 300 public health officials quit, were fired or retired, while at the same time, applications to

public health programs jumped 40%. Let's listen.

The pandemic has made many of our jobs a whole lot harder. This is especially true in public

health. The Associated Press and Kaiser Health News have documented

more than 300 state and local public health officials who've quit, retired, or been fired

since the pandemic began, often citing burnout, politics, sometimes physical threats.

I realized that I just couldn't imagine having another surge in me.

And yet, applications to public health graduate programs have jumped 40% since March of 2020.

It made me start to think about who I am and what I'm doing and how I can help.

Today, we bring you a conversation between one person who felt she had to walk away from public health

and another who heard the call and ran towards it.

From the studio at the Leonard Davis Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, I'm Dan Gorenstein, and this is tradeoffs.

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