ACerS Frontiers of Science and Society - Rustum Roy Lecture: ACerS Frontiers of Science and Society - Rustum Roy Lecture
Sponsored by: ACerS Others
Program Organizers: MS&T Administration, MS&T PCC
Tuesday 1:00 PM
November 3, 2020
Room: Virtual Meeting Room 38
Location: MS&T Virtual
1:00 PM Invited
Early Retrospectives from the Time of COVID: James Adair1; 1Pennsylvania State University
The objective of this lecture is to look back at the medical, policy decisions, media coverage, research, and various responses across the world during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in the first quarter of 2020. To be sure, the first quarter of this year was a tumultuous time of extremes in the response to the more formally named, SARS-CoV2. As I write this abstract, it would be foolish to try to reflect over what the world has been through this Spring 2020. For example, the actual pandemic numbers are still being developed at this point and will most likely not be fully articulated for several years much less the emotional angst imposed by talking about the many fatalities. However, amid the chaos at the height of the pandemic, there are emerging some notions of the truth. The quarantining and virtually world-wide economic shutdown will be debated for decades, but there are reasons for optimism for the human condition. The drastically altered supply chains for food, as one example, were stretched but did not break. Personal protective equipment, in short supply early in 2020, was replaced by repurposing manufacturing in various factories, large and small, throughout the world. No longer unsung heroes, disparate jobs from medical care givers and first responders to grocery store workers and long haul truckers were recognized for the absolutely essential role they served to keep our human society whole during this crisis. When challenged by yet another viral pandemic, most of us humans stepped forward and up to face the unknown, often poorly predicted progression of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond just the "I survived" meme, there is something positive to be said about the human-kind response in the Time of COVID.