Juliana Grant, MD MPH

Blog

Juliana’s thoughts on public health

COVID resources

I know it’s been awhile. I’ve been ridiculously busy with all sorts of COVID things but am staying healthy and am generally doing well. Thank you to everyone who has checked in to make sure I’m okay.

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There are ton of amazing COVID resources out there and I wanted to make sure I shared these in case you wanted other things to read. This is a collection of links that I’ve found useful or interesting over the past few months. This is certainly not an exhaustive list, but I hope it will be helpful for some.

Other collections of COVID-19 resources: 

Blogs and Twitter

There are some excellent blogs out there that are worth following. They cover a variety of topics related to COVID. 

  • Erin Bromage: COVID-19 musings: Erin is an Associate Professor of Biology at U. Mass Dartmouth where he specializes in infectious disease. His blog is an excellent source of both objective, thoughtful analyses and practical advice.

  • Trevor Bedford: This blog hasn’t been updated in awhile, but it’s a great explanation of how genomic analysis is used to monitor transmission.

  • Who to follow on Twitter: a curated list of COVID experts who tweet regularly.

Clinical

There are a tremendous number of clinical resources for COVID-19. This is just one high-quality article geared toward non-clinical folks and a link to UpToDate, which is a company that does very good evidence-based syntheses for clinical providers.

  • “A Rampage Through the Body” A Science article summarizing the ways SARS-CoV-2 impacts various organ systems.

  • UpToDate COVID-19 clinical topics: UpToDate is an excellent resource for clinicians to help them practice evidence-based medicine. While they normally charge for their materials, they have made all the COVID-19 articles freely available. This is geared toward medical providers so it might be challenging reading for some.

Conspiracy theories

They are out there and we all have had to talk to people about them. Here are some resources that might help you in these conversations:

  • Plandemic is nonsense: A very well researched and well written summary of why the documentary Plandemic is so inaccurate.

  • Shadowland: A series by The Atlantic about conspiracy theories in general. It’s not specific to COVID-19, but it is extremely well done and worthwhile reading.

Contact tracing

The CDC website on contact tracing is increasingly an excellent source of information on contact tracing and associated resources. There are also excellent resources from other organizations:

Data

State health departments are often the primary source of COVID data. However, the availability and presentation of the data vary widely. These are a few national and global sites that offer consistently good information on the number of COVID-19 cases, deaths, and/or tests.

  • COVIDtracking.com: This site scrapes the most current data from state health departments 3-4 times/day. The data are presented as simple tables, but they’re very current, the site assesses the data quality for each state, and they have historical data easily available.

  • Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center: Many people are already familiar with this site. It has country-(global) and county-level (U.S.) data. Personally, I find it to be clunky and challenging to use. 

  • NY Times: Very good maps, breakdowns by state and county, and other data visualization tools. The page can take a bit of time to load so be patient.

  • Our World in Data: An absolutely fantastic collection of data visualizations for COVID-19 globally with well-written explanations on how to interpret the data. You can spend a lot of time on this site. They’ve made it easy to look at one country at a time which makes this a good one to see how the U.S. is doing overall.

  • The public do not understand logarithmic graphs used to portray COVID-19: A short blog post about a recent study on how people interpret graphs. This is an excellent example of how the way we present data can have substantial impacts on how those data are used.

End of life planning

This topic has come up for many of us as we’ve faced the threat of COVID in our personal lives. The vast majority of people put off these conversations until far too late. In an ideal world, we should start having these discussions with our loved ones in our early 20s and continue them on a regular basis throughout our lives. If we are ever in a situation where someone else needs to make a medical decision on our behalf, it is so much easier for them if they know that they are simply carrying out our wishes rather than having to decide for us. Be kind to your loved ones and let them know what you want now. Ask them to take notes and keep those notes, and revisit the conversation every few years depending on your age. Here are some fantastic resources to help with these difficult conversations.

Health education

  • Washington State Department of Health COVID-19 Educational Materials: In theory CDC should be the best source for general health education but I’ve found their materials lacking in various ways. They are improving, but I’ve been tremendously impressed with the Washington State Department of Health materials. They are very clearly written, available in 25+ different languages (include ASL), and cover all the basic issues.

  • Seattle-King County Public Health COVID-19 site: If you need something in a language that isn’t available through the Washington State site, try Seattle-King County Public Health. They have fewer materials, but a few more languages.

  • Massachusetts Department of Public Health: In terms of content and presentation, I actually like these better than many other options. But they’re not available in as many languages as the Washington and Seattle materials.

  • Help! My Mask Fogs My Glasses: A NY Times article on some tips for fixing this issue. 

Health equity

  • Human Impact Partners COVID-19 Policy Platform: Human Impact Partners has done a fantastic job outlining ways we can address equity in the time of COVID. Many of these are derived from long-standing social justice and health equity ideas, but HIP puts them in the context of COVID-19 and gives specific action items for all of us to consider.

  • How the coronavirus exposed health disparities in communities of color: A Washington Post analysis of COVID-related health indictors and health equity among people of color. It has excellent local maps that highlight health disparities and discusses some of data gaps around race-ethnicity in surveillance data (the data the health departments routinely collect on reportable diseases like COVID).

Modeling and forecasts

  • CDC COVID modeling site: There are dozens of COVID-19 models and forecasts out there. CDC has a fairly complete list but be aware that some forecasts are removed and then added back at a later date, or removed entirely. It’s unclear how CDC decides which forecasts to include on any given day. I’ve seen some indications that this might be politically driven which saddens me tremendously.

    • Mortality forecasts: CDC creates a national composite forecast based on a number of other models as those models get updated. State-level forecasts are also available. 

    • COVID-19Surge is a super useful spreadsheet tool that hospitals and health departments can use to estimate the demand for hospital-based services. It is based on a range of pandemic planning scenarios.

    • Pandemic planning scenarios outlines five sets of parameters for predicting different COVID-19 scenarios. These can be used in conjunction with the COVID-19Surge tool. 

  • Rt.live: Model estimating the current reproductive number (Rt) for COVID-19 by state.

  • Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation: One of the most widely cited models and its easily available online (unlike many of the other models out there). It has country-by-country and state-by-state forecasts.

  • Why it’s so hard to see into the future of COVID-19: A well written article from Vox about the challenges of modeling and the source of one of the best quotes ever from Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard: “A very, very good physicist will be able to model what will happen if you walk out into the interstate and say exactly where your body parts might land, but the fact that another model puts the body parts in another place, doesn’t alter the central conclusion that you’re going to get run down by a car.”

Response planning tools from non-government organizations

There are so many of these out there now and many organizations continue to put out updates and more useful tools.

State plans

I plan to add links to all of the states as I find them. In the meantime, you can check out the NY Times overview of where all 50 states(+DC and PR) are around reopening

Juliana Grant