October 2022 CIC Webinar: Featured Q&A
Our monthly CIC webinars inspire some really fantastic audience Q&A sessions! In each monthly newsletter, we highlight one of the insightful questions raised from the webinar attendees.
A Featured Question from our October 2022 Webinar
This question was for Taylor Van Doren, Sitka Sound Science Center, who presented on the NSF grant "Survey Study of COVID-19 Responses in Southeast Alaska."
You can watch Taylor Van Doren's full presentation on our YouTube channel.
Question:
Given your research on COVID-19 and expertise on the 1918 influenza pandemic, can you share your thoughts about these two outbreaks as they relate to the future of pandemic response and recovery?
Answer from Taylor Van Doren:
Well, the 1918 flu is widely considered the forgotten pandemic, and I think there are some reasons for that. Namely, that it happened right on the heels of WWI. Also, that no one really understood what was happening. [...]
One of the things that I am trying to emphasize is that pandemics happen, but we can always gain knowledge from a pandemic, current or not. [...]
Moving forward, I hope we can find more cohesive ways to prepare for pandemics, knowing that this is going to happen again. But there's no reason we shouldn't be prepared for them now. In the late 20th century, we got too relaxed with how well antibiotics were working to prevent disease, and we now know that was a mistake. But we have a lot of knowledge we can tap into from different times and across the world. There's no reason to be unprepared and keeping these things in mind will help us when this happens again.
Thank you to all of our October 2022 speakers and our CIC Community audience members for keeping the conversation going!