Thread by @michaelmina_lab

I believe this is one of the most important articles written this entire pandemic

It hits on a topic that is central to our failed pandemic response

Public Health is not just a lot of Medicine stacked up.

Medicine can even be anti-public health

1/ nytimes.com/2022/01/14/opi…

A very simple example is isolation.

A doctor would NEVER prescribe isolation for a patient for their medical purposes.

We know however that isolation is needed for public health during a respiratory virus pandemic.

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But isolation is one of a few areas where we put public health policy in place - often w less than exacting data - because it was obvious that it’s important.

For the most part we think of pandemic response as physicians - this is simply wrong. As detailed in the article

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Bc this will come off the wrong way to MANY physicians - I am NOT saying doctors are not contributing to public health daily

I am saying that prioritizing a medical lens over a public health/engineering lens in policy/regulation pushes in the wrong directions for a pandemic

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Doctors in their individual capacity are doing exactly the right thing in this pandemic.

But our public health Policies to curb a global pandemic cannot rely on how doctors think at the bedside and the risk tolerances that physicians have. It’s different in public policy

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One way to think about it is airport security.

A TSA agent is there to ensure that every bag getting through is getting the best treatment possible to make sure it doesn’t have explosives.

But we do NOT ask TSA agents to engineer the overall airport security system.

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We know that those are very different skill sets and the metrics and tolerances in different vantage points are entirely different.

For example, part of travel security doesn’t even occur in the airport at all. It is at a much higher level than the conveyor belt.

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I failed to tag the author of the article in the first tweet - @aaronecarroll

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