The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) that emerged in central China in December presents a serious challenge to China’s healthcare system, as well as to global public health. Economic and political impacts will also be severe, with repercussions that will likely last for years. Meanwhile, some responses to the virus in the United States, and in other countries, raise questions about how the health crisis is being weaponized for racist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant agendas. On Wednesday February 19th, CAS hosted a teach-in to provide medical, social, political, and cultural perspectives on the coronavirus crisis, and to provide resources for students and educators to understand and address the crisis from multiple points of view.
The panel was moderated by CAS Director Tim Oakes and featured presentations by Dr. Molly Lamb, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Colorado School of Public Health and former Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer with the CDC; Xiaoling Chen, PhD student in Geography at CU Boulder whose research focuses on China’s healthcare reforms; and Dr. Travis Klingberg, Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at NYU Shanghai, who delivered his comments remotely from Shanghai.
Dr. Lamb discussed the basic epidemiology of COVID-19 which, compared with other epidemics and pandemics (SARS, MERS, common influenza) has a relatively low fatality rate and an average rate of transmission (though still quite low compared to some other infectious diseases such as measles, diphtheria, smallpox, or polio). Xiaoling Chen discussed the response to the virus in China, including the response of public and health professionals, local and national government, as well as various non-governmental organizations and volunteers. WeChat has been a particularly active forum within which information has been exchange and aid offered. It has also been a primary medium through which the public have expressed their frustration with the official response to the virus. Dr. Klingberg talked about what everyday life had been like in Shanghai and elsewhere in China, where a country of 1.4 billion people has been largely homebound for the past three weeks. He highlighted the differences in local government and central government reactions to the virus, and noted that while we here in the US are noticing discrimination against Chinese people as a general category, there has also been discrimination within China towards Wuhan and Hubei people.
As a follow up comment, Dr. Lamb also stressed the ways popular perceptions of epidemiological risk are skewed by media coverage. Dr. Lamb said that, "the current COVID-19 epidemic has caused ~75,000 cases and ~2,000 deaths worldwide so far (https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6). Last year, in the United States alone, the flu caused ~35,000,000 cases and ~34,000 deaths (https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html). So your risk of suffering and dying from flu, in absolute terms, is far greater than your risk of suffering and dying from COVID-19. People's perception of risk is strongly, strongly skewed by the heavy media coverage. As a result, people are definitely complacent about flu (average flu vaccine uptake is ~50-60% on any given year: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/fluvaxview/coverage-1819estimates.htm), even though flu is one of their biggest infectious disease risk. Getting the general public to accurately assess risk and to take informed, measured actions to protect their health is an Epidemiologist's biggest challenge. We can figure out the bugs' behavior. Human behavior is much more difficult to deal with."
Please click here for a set of slides containing links to resources presented during the teach-in.
The full video can be seen here: