Applying the Lessons of the Pandemic to Public Health

In this episode of More Intelligent Tomorrow podcast, Michael Mina, MD, PhD, and guest host, Sally Embrey, discuss the applications of the lessons of the pandemic to public health. How do we build the infrastructure to scale up rapid testing for future pandemics? What the world needs to mitigate the spread of a virus is not expensive medical diagnostic testing; it’s public health testing, and there are multiple types of public health testing.

It led me to a whole new area of science, of trying to understand what the new approaches are to testing. How can testing go from essentially a diagnostic medical tool to a true mitigation strategy?

Schools, by and large, don’t want to be doing this. They don’t want to be forcing their nurses to deal with thousands of swabs every day. They would much rather see people test at home.

One of the lasting things that I think will come from this pandemic is certainly a whole new era of technologies that are going to teach us, that are going to be put into our homes, that are going to be accessible to the everyday person without having to through some costly medical procedure.