Illustrations: Xinmei Liu

The Covid Audit

This Lawyer Ran Errands for His High-Risk Wife. Then an Epidemiologist Rated His Every Move.

Real life meets public health advice

Sara Austin
Elemental
Published in
13 min readSep 14, 2020

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Wouldn’t it be nice, as you go about your confusing, nerve-wracking, Covid-19-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 Epidemiologic Covid-19 Response Corps at the Boston University School of Public Health, asks real people to document what they’re doing to avoid Covid-19 and gives friendly feedback on actions you can take to support both public health — and your own. This week’s reviewers are response corps members Sarah Lincoln and Ivanna Rocha, graduate students in the Master of Public Health program at BU.

Our diarist is a lawyer who normally lives in Maryland with his wife and their school-aged daughter. His wife is both a busy, high-powered lawyer and a breast-cancer survivor undergoing treatments, putting her at higher risk for Covid-19. In March, her physician suggested she’d be safer in a less-populated area, so the family decamped to their small vacation condo in South Carolina.

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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.