In early January, Minnesota Alumni senior editor Elizabeth Foy Larsen accompanied a group of U of M School of Public Health (SPH) students on a two-week volunteer trip to India. The students were in the country to gain international experience in health issues.
While the students assisted a local organization called Jan Seva in Kolkata, a mysterious respiratory virus roughly 1,700 miles away in China was just starting to make headlines. On January 30, less than two weeks after the students had returned to the U.S., India reported its first confirmed case of COVID-19.
Public health education such as that offered at the U of M covers a multitude of arenas, including epidemiology, or the science of disease and how it spreads. Epidemiologists have been among the most quoted public health experts in recent months as COVID-19 has marched across the globe. Public health efforts, however, cover a much wider scope than just epidemiology, and include trying to ensure people remain healthy wherever they are, and whatever challenges they face locally.
As the coronavirus crisis has made abundantly clear, public health efforts are critical to keeping people across our interconnected world safe. And we have learned, to our dismay, that public health calamities in one area of the globe can soon become everyone’s problem.
