Eleanor Murray feels both burned out and determined to help. Two weeks ago, Murray, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Boston University, had never given an interview; now she’s given a bunch. Her cartoon infographic emphasizing the importance of social distancing has been translated into multiple languages and dialects, including Arabic, Vietnamese, and Cameroonian Pidgin. “It’s really nice to feel like I can do something,” she says. “But there’s also this feeling of ‘Am I doing enough?’”
On Twitter she’s been fielding questions and dispensing bits of wisdom, like “Simulation models aren’t crystal balls” and “For the sake of all that is good, wash your hands.”
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to claim victims and upend daily life, lots of epidemiologists, particularly those with expertise in infectious diseases, have found themselves suddenly in demand. They’re on TV urging governments to take further action, or on social media explaining how to interpret data about the disease. And we’re turning to them for answers about a new, daunting reality.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
Tara Smith feels that pressure. Smith is a professor of epidemiology at Kent State University, where she studies infections that are passed between animals and human beings (atop her website is a photo of Smith wearing protective gear next to a photo of a pig). She’s edited a book on Ebola and teaches a course on plagues and pandemics. “My way to think about this is to write about it and to provide information for others,” she says. “That’s how I’ve been dealing with it.”
Lately she’s been getting more interview requests than she can handle, along with messages from concerned family members and friends. She recently received a Facebook message from an ex-boyfriend who is “sick with what he hopes isn’t coronavirus.”
When Leslie McClure told her two kids that they wouldn’t be able to see their friends for a while, they blamed her at first. McClure, a biostatistician and chair of the epidemiology department at Drexel University, explained that it wasn’t her fault — she was just an expert delivering bad news. Last week she wrote on her blog, Stat Girl, that working at home, she found it hard to concentrate on her research when she was worried about the safety of everyone she knows. “I’ve been in caretaking mode as a leader at work, and also at home,” she says.
Like many others, McClure has had challenging conversations with her parents, who are in their 70s. “They respect my expertise, but it doesn’t agree with their own personalities,” she says.
She’s also been frustrated with how some would-be mathematicians on social media are making confident pronouncements about, say, transmission rates. “There are always people using data in ways that don’t make sense and trying to wade through it is exhausting,” McClure says. “If you have to say, ‘I’m not an expert,’ you should stop right there.”
Smith has shot down misinformation from nonexperts and has blocked people on Twitter when they were obnoxious or “incredibly racist” about a disease that originated in another country. Engaging, though, has its pitfalls. “When you push back, you also spread what they’re saying to other people,” she says. “I’ve been trying to amplify good information instead.”
Search the Twitter histories of epidemiologists, and you’ll see that Covid-19 has been a lively topic among them for months. Smith first heard reports about a mysterious illness in Wuhan, China, in late December. So when the World Health Organization announced the discovery of a novel coronavirus in early January, she wasn’t surprised.
Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard epidemiologist, tweeted on January 23 that he was “deeply worried about this new coronavirus outbreak,” in part because it was “silently contagious.” His warning was dismissed by some as alarmist at the time, but now it appears distressingly prescient. His follower count has risen by thousands in the past few days.
William Hanage started having nightmares about Covid-19 back in January. On February 22, he tweeted, “This will be a pandemic.” A month later he was calling it the “greatest challenge I have seen in my lifetime to public health.” Hanage, an associate professor of epidemiology at Harvard, is married to another epidemiologist, Helen Jenkins, an assistant professor of biostatistics at Boston University. “It is very hard, though, working from home with two kids bouncing around us trying to keep them from fighting, while also grappling with this at multiple scales,” he writes in an email. “It is very, very, very strange being an infectious-disease epidemiologist right now.”
His nightmares have recently gone away. That’s not because he’s any less worried, “but mostly because I am so exhausted.”
