Journalists Covering COVID-19: What Do You Need to Know

Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) members are invited to a special webcast event “Covering COVID-19: What Do You Need to Know?” on 10 March 2020.

The COVID-19 outbreak story is evolving quickly and there are many unknowns about the epidemic, including how contagious the virus is, its mortality rate and whether there is undetected spread occurring outside of China. Providing accurate information to the public is more important than ever in this moment of uncertainty. Hear a panel of infectious disease experts and a journalist explain what is known, what to watch out for, where to find trusted resources and how to combat misinformation and confusion.

• Maryn McKenna, independent journalist, author; Senior Fellow of the Center for the Study of Human Health at Emory University
• Michael Osterholm, Ph.D., M.P.A., director, Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy
• Saskia Popescu, senior infection preventionist, ELBI Fellow and managing editor; HonorHealth, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, Pandora Report
• Angie Rasmussen, Ph.D., Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, Associate Research Scientist
• Moderator: Bara Vaida, AHCJ core topic leader/infectious diseases

Saskia Popescu is an experienced infectious disease epidemiologist and infection preventionist with a strong background in project management, translation of complex issues into frontline applications, and enhancing healthcare biopreparedness. She is passionate about healthcare biopreparedness, antimicrobial resistance, and driving change across sectors in global health security.

Angie Rasmussen, Ph.D., is an associate research scientist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. She is a virologist studying host responses to infection by combining classical virology with modern systems biology approaches. Her research objectives are to identify host response signatures predictive of infection severity or disease outcome and host pathways to target drug development or repurposing. She is particularly interested in viruses that are highly pathogenic, newly emergent or likely to emerge because of climate change, land development, or ecological disruption.

Maryn McKenna is a journalist and book author and teaches health and science writing and storytelling, and media literacy. She has reported from epidemics and disasters, and farms and food production sites, on most of the world’s continents, including a field hospital in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, to Midwestern farms devastated by the 2015 epidemic of avian flu. She writes for The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, WIRED, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, NPR, and numerous other magazines and sites. She is the author of the 2017 bestseller Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats (National Geographic Books, Sept. 2017), which received the 2018 Science in Society Award, making her a two-time winner of that prize.

Please visit the AHCJ’s Covering COVID-19: What Do You Need to Know event website for more information.