Illustrations: Xinmei Liu

The Covid Audit

This Teacher Went Back to School. A Team of Epidemiologists Tracked Her Moves.

Real life meets public health advice

Sara Austin
Elemental
Published in
15 min readOct 16, 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 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 Ruby Barnard-Mayers, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Boston University School of Public Health and an alumna of the BU Master of Public Health program, and Sarah Lincoln, a graduate student in the Master of Public Health program at BUSPH. The pair worked under the supervision of Ellie Murray, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor of epidemiology at BUSPH.

For this edition, our diarist is a behavioral specialist who has spent two decades in special education, serving kids whose disabilities range from anxiety to severe autism. Currently, she works with students, teachers, and paraeducators at a New England public…

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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.