The Covid Audit
This Executive Took a Road Trip. 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 new 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 reviewer is Eleanor Murray, ScD, assistant professor of epidemiology and co-director of the response corps; follow her on Medium and Twitter at @epiellie.
Our first diarist is a nonprofit executive who lives in New York City with her husband and two sons; no one in the family has preexisting conditions that raise their risk for Covid-19. She kept a diary of a road trip over the July Fourth holiday weekend to check in on her parents in Kentucky. “My parents are in their eighties and the pandemic ability to work from anywhere — a privilege, I realize — has, oddly, made it somewhat easier to visit them for a weekend and help clean up, check on which meds need refilling, monitor their overall health, and break up the monotony of being locked inside with your life partner for months,” she says. “This last bit applies as much to me as to my folks, as I am leaving my husband at home.”
DAY ONE, 12 P.M.
I always like to start a road trip with a full tank of gas, so I am dismayed to see, while stuck in traffic on the approach to the George Washington Bridge leaving Manhattan, that we are down to a quarter tank. I was really hoping to minimize stops on the 700-mile way from New York to Kentucky, and a quarter tank is the difference between one fuel stop and two.
