THE COVID AUDIT
This College Student Headed Back to Campus. Then an Epidemiologist Rated Her Every Move.
In our new series, real life meets public health advice
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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 Bertha Hidalgo, PhD, MPH, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Shagun Modi, an MPH candidate in epidemiology and biostatistics at BUSPH. The pair worked under the supervision of Ellie Murray, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor of epidemiology at BUSPH.
Our diarist, a returning undergrad at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast, tracked her actions over three days as she moved into college: One day in transit, one moving into her dorm, and one in a school-mandated quarantine. “The college released a bunch of long emails each time a new Covid guideline was set over the summer, and there’s a guide on the school website I’ve been referring to,” she says. “Everything is pretty clear, and if we are confused, we can always email the deans for clarification. From what I’ve heard, my school is handling this as well as any college in the country.” We’ll see if the response team agrees…
Day 1, 5 p.m.
I’m going to college tomorrow. My school has asked all its returning students to quarantine for 14 days before arriving on campus. I’ve been home anyway: I had a job lined up as a counselor at the sleepaway camp I’ve attended for 11 summers, but all of the overnight camps in Massachusetts were shut down. So I ended up staying with my parents and sister in New York City all summer…
