The Covid Audit
How One Pastor Is Keeping His Midwestern Church Safe from Covid-19
A team of epidemiologists rate a pastor’s safety measures for his staff and congregation
Wouldn’t it be nice, as you go about your confusing, nerve-wracking, coronavirus-avoiding days, to have an epidemiologist on call to answer your many questions? Consider the Covid Audit the next best thing. This project, a collaboration between Elemental and the Epidemiology Covid-19 Response Corps at the Boston University School of Public Health, asks real people to keep a diary about what they’re doing to avoid Covid-19 and gives friendly feedback from the Response Corps team on actions you can take to support public health — and your own.
This week’s reviewers are Leona M. Ofei, a graduate student in the Master of Public Health program at BUSPH, and Ellie Murray, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor of epidemiology at BUSPH.
Our diarist this time around is the 35-year-old lead pastor at a church with about 2,000 members in Missouri. We’ll hear a bit about the precautions he and his team have taken since the beginning of the pandemic, and then travel with him through a few days in September when he was helping to make some important decisions about church worship services.
