Episode 17: Data And Public Health - Tale Of A Pandemic

The field of Public Health has always involved collecting and analyzing data but when a worldwide pandemic hit suddenly, it was necessary to speed up these processes so as to make decisions and recommendations in real time. As the pandemic changed and shifted, with vaccines and treatments, so did the need for public health data. In this episode I talk to Amelia Burke-Garcia and Lucy Rabinowitz Bailey of NORC at the University of Chicago, an independent research organization, who conducted just such a study in real time to understand the pandemic’s effect on public mental health and coping strategies.

We talk about the kind of data they used, the challenge of collecting it and processing it so quickly, how data changed throughout the pandemic, how they approached issues of bias and privacy and how AI figured into the equation. We also touched on some hot topics in the news - the proposed moratorium on generative AI research and its effect on public health as well as the effect of social media on teen mental health.