The Pandemic: Science and Society

2 units

The COVID-19 Pandemic has severely impacted life on Earth, and in the USA, in particular. New information is released daily to a public that is often unable to interpret the meaning or significance. How are individuals, groups, businesses, and/or governments interpreting this information? What impact does it all have on our lives? This course will be an immersion into the many intersecting aspects of life in a pandemic. The first section of the course will focus on the virus and illness itself: the scientific classification, possible treatments and vaccines, testing, safety measures, at-risk groups and health outcomes for different groups, and understanding the numbers. This section will incorporate lessons on how to interpret and evaluate scientific information, how the information gets communicated to the public, and how it gets incorporated into policy. The second section will start to integrate connections to society at large, including health disparities, understanding how environmental destruction and agricultural systems are related to disease outbreaks, global connections, racism and COVID-19, and variation in effectiveness of dealing with the virus in different countries. The final section will cover how the pandemic intersects with different aspect of our lives from finance to law, mental health, education, domestic violence, the arts, and on and on. You will hear experts in these areas talk to us about how COVID-19 has changed virtually every aspect of life as we know, how we can mitigate these effects, and what the future looks like. Throughout the course, you will have the opportunity to hone your skills at communicating the information you learn in the class with the public.