Dean's COVID-19 Commentary

Nov 7, 2022

I was asked by Alfredo Morabia, a friend and editor of the American Journal of Public Health, to participate in a panel discussion at APHA's national meeting on “Modernizing CDC.” To prepare, I read Silent Invasion by Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator during the Trump Administration.

Oct 24, 2022

Academia has returned to its 2019 guise with in-person meetings and a reactivated lecture circuit. Many meetings had been postponed by the pandemic. Now, the fall schedule is filled with make-up events. On October 14, I spoke at Johns Hopkins on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Oct 18, 2022

Causation was on my mind this week, as it has been many times in the past. The finding that an association is causal may have profound implications and lead to action.

Oct 12, 2022

Former residents of Camp Lejeune have become a new target of a tsunami of advertisements from lawyers, recruiting people who may be eligible for compensatory damages due to the long history of contaminated drinking water on the base.

Oct 4, 2022

Over the last month, I have read Fiona Hill’s "There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century" — a book for our times. You may remember her name from the first impeachment of President Trump during which she testified on matters related to Russia and Ukraine. I was particularly absorbed by her account of classism in the United Kingdom.

Sep 26, 2022

Colorado first. The hospitalization count for September 20 was 145, down from 159 on September 13. However, test positivity is trending up, reaching 5.63%. Not to contradict President Biden, but the COVID-19 pandemic is not over.

Sep 19, 2022

Colorado’s air quality problems were in the news last week, as the Environmental Protection Agency shifted the status of the Denver Metro/Northern Front Range ozone non-attainment region to severe, raising questions about what should be done to grapple with rising ozone pollution.

Sep 12, 2022

Nationally, the epidemic curve continues downward, and globally, a variant of concern that will interrupt the current lull has yet to emerge, offering time to build resiliency.

Sep 6, 2022

Last week, CDC Director Walensky endorsed the recommendation of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices for the updated boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Misinformation remains a barrier, but what is the solution?

Aug 29, 2022

Last week’s COVID-19 hospitalization count was 184, a substantial drop from the five-week plateau in the low 300s. This lull coincides with the start of classes at the Colorado School of Public Health—today.

Aug 22, 2022

CDC Director Walensky acknowledged that the CDC has not performed as it should have during the pandemic and called for an overhaul of the 11,000-person agency, leaving questions about the lack of a cohesive public health system in the US.

Aug 15, 2022

With the pandemic stalled, the pace of notable public health events has slowed somewhat, but this last week has brought ample fodder.

Aug 1, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic has rescaled time into Before COVID-19 (BC) and After COVID-19 (AC). In this calendar, we are now well into AC year three.

Jul 26, 2022

Last week, heat and climate change eclipsed the COVID-19 pandemic as the public health threat of the moment. Throughout the United Kingdom, high temperature records were broken and then re-broken.

Jul 18, 2022

Surveillance is a core tool of public health, fundamental to capturing the course of disease and the consequences of interventions. Since its start, we have tracked the COVID-19 pandemic with indicators of infection, disease, and death, while advances in data sciences supported the successful implementation of valuable, encompassing national and global databases.

Jul 11, 2022

Omicron subvariants continue to rise in Colorado, and nationally, BA.5 now accounts for the majority of cases. Fortunately, BA.4 and BA.5, while more transmissible than earlier subvariants, are not more virulent. However, they have structural changes that facilitate immune escape.

Jul 10, 2022

Nearly half of Jon Samet's tenure as dean has been spent battling COVID-19, from modeling the virus's spread to advising state and local leaders. The pandemic ”brought a new prominence to public health and its persistence in the public eye”, Samet reflects.

Jul 5, 2022

I am just back from a trip to Scotland and my first brush with having COVID-19 is a result. And the Supreme Court released yet another decision with profound public health implications last week, West Virginia v. the EPA.

Jun 27, 2022

There were two very discouraging decisions from the Supreme Court last week, both with profound implications for public health. One was the reversal of the previously-ruled, constitutionally-guaranteed right to abortion coming from the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973 and the second, the striking down of New York’s long-standing law on owning or carrying a handgun without a permit.

Jun 20, 2022

Yesterday was Juneteenth, a day celebrating June 19, 1865, when African American slaves in Galveston, Texas, were informed of their freedom after the Civil War’s end. The day offers a needed reminder that slavery’s legacy is lasting and still imprinting our country.