COVID-19 – A Real-Time View of Its Epidemiology and the Political and Social Response

We are living in rather a scary time in the midst of this COVID-19 pandemic. We are predicting upwards of 200,000 people to be infected in the US as of a week from now, this is because the number of cases appears to double every 2 to 3 days. This will have a dramatic effect on the capacity of our health care system.

To make sense of this it gives me great pleasure and distinct honor to introduce this afternoon’s speaker Dr. Paul Jackson who is one of the co-instructors of the Science and Tech course here at MIIS. He was busy updating his slides until a couple of days ago because this field is so fast moving.

Dr. Paul Jackson is uniquely qualified to talk about this topic as he has an extensive background in molecular biology (PhD from University of Utah), bioforensics, and biological threats. He spent 24 years at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) where he worked on the development of the biological threat reduction efforts there. He was appointed a Laboratory Fellow at Los Alamos in recognition of his efforts. He then moved to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2005 where he was a Senior Scientist in the Global Security and Physical and Life Sciences Directorates until his retirement in 2013. He is now an affiliate at Stanford’s CISAC and an Adjunct Professor here at MIIS. Together we have taught more than 600+ students over 8 years, and thanks to him I don’t go to salad bars anymore!