Epidemiologists: reluctant heroes
Health experts emerged from medical circles and academia to take spotlight
‘My phone just rings non-stop’: Health experts find themselves in demand — and it seems they’re always on call,
When this is all said and done, Colin Furness might be able to pick up his home phone again when it rings.
He can’t do that right now. If he does, it’s a near-certainty that there will be a journalist on the other end of the line, asking for an insight into the COVID-19 pandemic, asking for an on-air interview, asking for a bit more of his time.
He’s happy to give it. But each moment he’s doing interviews is one less moment that he’s doing things with his family. And that family time, these days, is at a premium.
“It’s rarely less than about a half-dozen requests a day, and it goes up to maybe 50 or 60 on a big news day. That’s a lot. And I try and respond to them all, (but) I can’t. there’s no chance I can do them all.”
Furness, 52, an epidemiologist — someone who studies the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases — at the University of Toronto, has been one of Ontario’s go-to sources for information about the spread of the coronavirus over the past year.
In those past 12 months — since Health Canada announced this country’s first case of what would come to be called COVID-19 — he and others in his field have emerged from medical circles and academia to become reluctant celebrities, of a stripe. They have been deluged by requests for information, from the media and the public alike. As the public has learned terms such as “R number” or “social distancing,” this select group have been indefatigable educators, trying to spread useful, needed information about a deadly virus. Their efforts have come with a price, though, in the form of bigger workloads, longer days and lost time with family and loved ones.
“My wife keeps telling me I’ve got to get more choosy,” says Furness. “But it’s like, some people listen to CBC, some people listen to Talk 1010 radio. If you want to be able to talk to a wide range of people, I think you’ve got to do it in a wide range of media.”
Furness slid into this role almost by accident. His day job is as an assistant professor at the
Faculty of Information at U of T. He calls himself a social scientist before an epidemiologist. Though his background in epidemiology comes from his work with hospitals and infection control, he approaches it from the perspective of how people behave, how people think and how people and organizations make decisions.
One of the advantages to that background, he says, is that it gives him more freedom than some of his colleagues to critique the government reaction to the pandemic.
Last March, Furness was optimistic about Ontario’s response to the oncoming epidemic. Ontario has expertise, he said at the time. We know what we’re doing, he said. We’re going to nail this.
By April and May, he was actually losing sleep. His one overarching criticism of public health, he says, is that it’s way too quiet.
Unplanned, he became a sharp critic of — as he puts it — how needlessly badly Ontario has responded to the coronavirus epidemic, and a prime source for the province’s journalists.
“That’s where there’s this dichotomy comes in,” he says. “(There are) people who think what I’m doing is useful as a public service to try and explain to people what’s going on, to try and make sense of policy or lack thereof. And then there are people who think I’m making a lot of noise and causing trouble, and needlessly so.”
Furness has had to develop ways to deal with that criticism. He’s more curt now on emails and Twitter, and far more blunt, he says. He says he’s not above blocking an email address or two, if he feels he needs to.
“No one wants us to be over this faster than me, because I think I’d really like to go back to normal,” he says.
“I don’t like the phone ringing all the time. I don’t like requests for interviews. I don’t actually like doing any of it. I think it’s important, and I’ve gotten better at it. And I think it’s useful. … But gosh, I sometimes joke it’s a real sign of the apocalypse when the local epidemiologist is a famous person.”
When this is over, when everything about COVID-19 is said and done, he wants to take his family to New York City and show them around. When he can tick off that box, he says — if that can feel safe — then he’ll know we’re all in a good place. And maybe he can start picking up his home phone again.
“I don’t have a life,” says Dr. Isaac Bogoch.
“I go to work, and I come home, and I really try my hardest to carve out a few hours to create some semblance of normalcy for my family — you know, bedtime, book-time, playtime, dinner-as-a-family time. It doesn’t always work out perfectly. But by all means, there’s an effort.”
A year ago, Bogoch, 42, was lead author on a paper titled, “Pneumonia of unknown aetiology in Wuhan, China: potential for international spread via commercial air travel.”
It was one of the first, if not the very first, scientific articles published on what would later, notoriously, become known as the coronavirus.
This was old hat for Bogoch. As an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, this was what he did. He’d published articles on the Ebola virus outbreak in West Africa in 2014; he’d studied the Zika outbreak in 2015 in South America. And he’d done a lot of media interviews for both.
But if the concept of being an in-demand media source wasn’t new, the scope of the attention for the coronavirus epidemic over the past year certainly has been.
Nothing in his pre-COVID-19 career has gone away. He still has teaching and research responsibilities. He still has clinical patient-care responsibilities, which have increased with the influx of patients. And, like others, he takes a turn filling in on the COVID-19 wards.
But the media requests are a barrage, he says.
“My email is disgusting,” he says. “My email is just a war zone. I open it up, and my heart sinks every time, because there’s like a new wall of unread messages. And my phone just rings non-stop.”
Some of it’s media, some of it’s people in the community asking him questions.
“I truly, truly, truly try my best to answer all of these. But of course, I’m not going to do it,” he says. “I can sort of triage the urgent ones from the non-urgent ones, but … it’s just a disaster. My inbox is terrible.”
Like most health professionals, the past year has left him worn out and tired. He’s working long hours, and the workload seems never-ending. But he believes that the media work is important, that communicating with the general public part of his job.
He copes, he says, by trying to maintain a little of the familiar in his life.
“I do prioritize a lot of time during the day to spend with my family. I know I’m not perfect, of course — I can do better — but it is a big priority to just shut everything out and have some quality time with my wife and kids.”
He tries to exercise regularly, though that sometimes means settling for a run at
11:30 p.m. He says he has a “dark and inappropriate” sense of humour. That helps.
And he’s not above treating himself to glass of whisky sometimes late at night when he’s going through yet another wall of email.
He’s looking forward to a time, post-COVID-19, when things get back to normal, when he can take his family on a road trip; west to Calgary to see his parents, further west to Vancouver to see his wife’s parents, with stops in-between to see some old friends.
But that time seems a long way off. Right now, he’s got more than enough on his plate.
“There’s a job to do. There’s patients to see, there’s vaccines to get out,” he says. There’s lots that needs to be done, and things are improving, but we still have a ways to go,” he says. “Sitting idle is not an option.” is
Jeff Kwong sent his children away for the first few months of the pandemic.
They stayed at his sister-inlaw’s for most of March, April and May. That wasn’t an easy decision, but it allowed him to maintain his punishing sevenday, 100-plus-hour-week schedule at the beginning of the outbreak without having to worry about them.
Kwong, 44, and the interim director of the Centre for Vaccine Preventable Diseases at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health, describes those early months as “just insane.” In addition to trying to do some analytics on the data he had from the early stages of the pandemic, he also went to Toronto Public Health to help with its contact tracing. And, as a family doctor, there was the clinical work to be done.
On top of that, there were the media requests. Dozens and dozens of them to be shoehorned into whatever time he could find. Like Bogoch, the media attention wasn’t new, but the magnitude of it was. Like Bogoch, he’s not been able to accommodate everyone, but he’s been making the effort.
“It is exhausting. But you just feel that you’re in this vortex and you’re just doing it,” he says.
“The reason I do do a lot of them is just because I feel like it’s something I am able to contribute. I’m not working in the hospitals. So, I feel like if I can get the message out of what people need to do to stay safe, and if that saves a life, I think it’s worthwhile.”
Having the inside track on the epidemic can be a doubleedged sword, he says. On the one hand, knowing what the research says decreases his stress on a personal level. He knows what it takes to keep himself and his family safe, and those measures are relatively easy.
But the flip side is that he also sees the big picture.
“I think that what stresses me out is that I do know what the problems are. And I see that we’re not doing, perhaps enough to address these issues.”
“It weighed on me, because I know that so many of these could have been prevented … a lot of the deaths we’ve seen in long-term care, and in these essential workers.”
As the spring rolled into summer, some of that workload eased. The children came back home. Kwong was able to reduce his workload from 100hours a week to a — for him — more normal load of about 60.
He says he’s feeling somewhat optimistic. The next two or three months, he says, are going to be tough. But there are vaccines available, and if most people could be vaccinated by September, the province — and the country — should be in good shape.
He remembers Feb. 27, 2020, vividly. That’s the night he and his wife scored tickets to the musical Hamilton. They went out to dinner before the show. That — almost a year ago now — was the last time they’ve been able to do that.
That, he says, is one of the things he’s most looking forward to when his days are no longer consumed by the coronavirus.
“Sometimes you don’t appreciate these things until you can’t have them,” he says.
“I sometimes joke it’s a real sign of the apocalypse when the local epidemiologist is a famous person.”
DR. COLIN FURNESS
“I think that what stresses me out is that I do know what the problems are. And I see that we’re not doing, perhaps enough to address these issues.”
DR. JEFF KWONG