Welcome to Season 2 of 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 secretary of Maryland's Health Department.

Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day

through informative 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. In this bonus episode, I caught up with Caitlin Rivers, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Our topic is voting in COVID-19. Let's listen.

Hello, Dr. Rivers. Thank you so much for joining me, and our topic today is voting.

So this is a big deal this fall. Yeah, thanks for

having me back to chat about this. So take us through the different kinds of voting and then we

can talk a little bit about the risks and how people can protect themselves. There's a few different

options and the options that are available to you, and the dates

that correspond to them varies by state, so you will have to look this up.

But there is mail-in voting where you cast your vote by mail.

There's early voting, which is usually in-person voting, but starts much earlier than election

day, and then there is election day on site in-person voting.

So there's been a lot of attention to mail in voting. And obviously, if people are filling out

their ballots at home and mailing it in, they're not at risk for getting the coronavirus through that

process. But not as much attention to the actual risks

...