Mark Schiefelbein/AP Photo
Beijing Applied Biological Technologies employees work developing COVID-19 molecular diagnostic test kits during a government-organized tour for journalists, Beijing, May 2020.
The Open Mind explores the world of ideas across politics, media, science, technology, and the arts. The American Prospect is republishing this edited excerpt.
Alexander Heffner: When did you have an instinct based on what was transpiring that this would be a huge public health event if not catastrophe?
Rachel Graham: Early January, very early January, I was following some trackers [like Flu Trackers]. It’s a blog, they’re aggregating news from all over the world about diseases and ongoing epidemics and they started paying attention to this, very end of December, very beginning of January and updating their blog with Chinese news sources.
It became pretty apparent early on in January if you were following the Chinese news sources and the translations that there was something major, major happening and it looked a bit like SARS but it was different.
Heffner: What was the most alarming thing from the outset for you?
Graham: The fact that the people in Wuhan maybe weren’t as concerned initially. You didn’t see it, people wearing masks in the streets.
But there’s so much great journalism and great journalists in China—hopefully they haven’t all been kicked out—the Wall Street Journal has many great journalists there, the New York Times, Washington Post, different outlets. And they were expressing concern about what they were seeing on the ground also long before the lockdowns happened.
Of course, the real frightening part of it in early January was the fact that the Chinese New Year was coming up and that was sort of going to be an exacerbating event, a series of events, with people traveling and congregating. A lot of the pandemic experts that I follow were extremely concerned that this was sort of the worst-case scenario with the New Year.
Heffner: There was such poor communication from the government line in China and then just repeated by the United States, by Governor Cuomo, initially by President Trump. It was like the novelty of it could not be appreciated in the way [and] your particular public health communication expertise helped with the aggregation. You were aware of the potential scope of the crisis.
On your Twitter account, you quoted the former secretary Michael Levitt, former governor of Utah: “Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after will seem inadequate.” And it was really only a community on Twitter. People like to say Twitter isn’t real life. Well, Twitter kind of became real life because of people like you and others who were caring enough for their fellow citizens to aggregate this information and you know it’s really a credit to, to all of that work that you’ve done. So I just want to thank you. What has been most revealing about running this Twitter account?
Graham: I think people want sort of an apolitical, non-biased, just source of news and information. There’s a lot of distrust in media sources unfortunately for many reasons. But this account tweets those sources [and] studies that that are preprints and studies in JAMA and other reputable sources.
What’s neat about Twitter is you can see experts discussing the latest research in real time. And I think that’s what's incredibly unique about Twitter during this pandemic, is you can follow these people, see their lines of thinking, they interact with other experts in their Twitter feed. They interact with laypeople who don’t understand—they say, can you dumb this down for me?
That’s what I love about Twitter, this immediate information, discussion, and the fact that it can be translated to laypeople. There’s really no excuse not to under be fully informed about this pandemic that we’re all living through because there are many good sources of information.
There are bad sources of information, there are conspiracy theories. But the one that’s particularly bothersome right now is this idea that there are fewer deaths from COVID, and pretty much all the data we have is that the deaths have been undercounted, not just in the U.S. but other countries also because people died at home before they had a test.
You know, I lost a relative in a nursing home in New Orleans. He wasn’t tested but he died from pneumonia in March, and it’s certainly possible it wasn’t COVID, certainly possible it was COVID. That was the very beginning of New Orleans’ terrible outbreaks. So I definitely think they’re undercounted deaths.
Heffner: The quote that you have now on your COVID-19—and for those interested and watching us on PBS stations, it’s @V2019n, which is Rachel Graham’s Covid-19 handle, aggregating minute to minute, day by day, all the COVID related developments—“There’s nothing left to warn against.” You're quoting New York Times’s Donald McNeil (“There is nothing left to warn against. Everyone, almost everyone understands.”)
You’ve done such remarkable work, not only in sharing important news, but also encouraging folks to give to local food banks and pantries and updating every day or every week with a new community that is particularly paralyzed by this—so Houston Food Bank is one that we want to give a shout-out to right now. There are a lot of vulnerable cities and rural communities too, rural hospital systems.
Graham: I’m not sure that they don’t understand. It seems to me that they do understand the risks by now. And it seems to me that people are moving and some people, not the majority according to the polling data, but some people are moving into what is acceptable losses, to quote unquote save the economy.
But most public health experts that I follow say this is not an A or B choice. The Chinese president tried to open China back up early. When you have a large percentage of the population that’s still fearful of enclosed spaces and contact with others, and you have some states that have embraced this masking and other areas that haven’t you know, people are not going to go out and stimulate the economy until they feel safe.
Frieden [Dr. Tom Freiden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the Obama administration] testified yesterday before Congress that reopening isn’t an on and off switch—it’s like a dimmer switch. I thought that was really powerful messaging that you need to be able to like slowly get things [going] and then if you see cases rising, you know, start shutting it down.
I do like the idea of some of what some of the states are doing, reopening outdoor areas if they can control crowds, and because a lot of the experts I follow seem to think that these are the less risky activities and people really want to get out.
