Recorded August 24th, 2020.

Our guest today is Dr. Ashish Jha, the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI), to discuss issues around schools reopening and then also discuss the topics of viral spread and what we currently know about immunity to COVID-19.

Your host is Dr. Ted O’Connell, family physician, educator, and author of numerous textbooks and peer-reviewed articles. He holds academic appointments at UCSF, UC Davis, and Drexel University's medical schools and also founded the Kaiser Permanente Napa-Solano Community Medicine and Global Health Fellowship, the first program in the U.S. to formally combine both community medicine and global health. Follow Ted on Instagram (@tedoconnellmd) and Twitter (@tedoconnell)!

Dr. Ashish Jha is the K.T. Li Professor of Global Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Global Health Institute (HGHI). He is a practicing General Internist and is also Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Jha received his MD from Harvard Medical School and trained in Internal Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. He completed his General Medicine fellowship at Brigham & Women’s Hospital and received his MPH from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dr. Jha is a member of the Institute of Medicine at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In September, Dr. Jha will begin work as the Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.

Dr. Jha’s research focuses on improving the quality and costs of healthcare systems with a specialized focus on the impact of policies. He has published over two hundred papers in prestigious journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, and the British Medical Journal, and heads a personal blog on using statistical data research to improve health quality. He has led groundbreaking research around Ebola and is now on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response. Dr. Jha leads national analysis of key issues around the COVID-19 pandemic, advising policy makers and elected officials at the state and federal level and appearing frequently on national television news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, and in written coverage from national newspapers including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Harvard Global Health Institute is providing critical analysis and data on national and state by state testing with Dr. Jha, a vocal advocate for increased testing and contact tracing who has written extensively on the subject. His work has appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Health Affairs, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and Stat News among others.

Links for this episode

Twitter: @ashishkjha

Website: Harvard Global Health Institute

LinkedIn: ashishjha

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Producers: Christopher Breitigan.

Executive Producer: Patrick C. Beeman, MD

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