Illustrations: Xinmei Liu

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

Sara Austin
Elemental
Published in
11 min readAug 19, 2020

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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…

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Sara Austin
Elemental

Sara Austin is a writer and editor in New York. She has held senior editorial positions at Real Simple, Cosmopolitan, Self, and Marie Claire.