Public Health and Analogies in the COVID-19 Era

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, public health officials and others have used concepts such as "waves" to convey information about the spread of disease. In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Louise Archer, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Laboratory of Quantitative Global Change Ecology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, who wrote in BioScience about disease analogies. She and her coauthors found that some analogies are more useful than others -- for instance, wave analogies may instill a sense of inevitability and depress disease mitigation, whereas firefighting analogies may encourage action while simultaneously contributing to a more nuanced understanding of disease dynamics.