As the pandemic wears on, I have actually started to forget what the inside of my workplace looks like. The last time I saw it was the second week of March, when my colleagues and I were informed to work from house. Most of us had an easy sufficient time making the shift: At the Computational Health Informatics Program, an initiative collectively run by Boston Children’s Healthcare facility and Harvard Medical School, we spend much of our time in front of screens anyway. We had actually been studying Covid-19 considering that late January, modeling its spread in hopes of understanding how it might progress in the weeks and months ahead. Now we ‘d swap our desk chairs for couches. I switched off my office mood lamp and fairy lights, got my laptop computer, and quickly familiarized myself with the VPNs I would require to gain remote access to our institutional computing services.
Others in my field weren’t so lucky. As I settled in at home, I saw tweet after tweet from researchers all over the world whose professional lives had ground to a stop. Laboratories were closing down. Clinicians could no longer see their clients. The postdoctoral job market had actually suddenly dried up, and many current graduates were worried about the gaps the pandemic would leave in their CVs. Even among those who still had work to do, there was a sensation of listlessness: Everyone wanted to contribute something to the fight against Covid-19, but some concerned they didn’t have the capability to do so on their own.
On March 18, five days after the Trump administration declared a national emergency, I decided it was time to harness all this bottled-up mental capacity. I put out a call on Twitter for competent volunteers who wanted to use their extra time to tackle a myriad of research concerns at the intersection of computing and Covid-19 epidemiology.
Right now, expressions of interest flooded my inbox: I heard from a veterinary clinician in India with expertise in zoonotic illness, a category that includes Covid-19; an engineer in Canada who ‘d just recently completed her master’s degree in artificial intelligence and might help with deep knowing; a health law and policy specialist from France who might talk to the pandemic’s legal and political implications.
Shocked by the deluge, I employed my friend Angel Desai, an infectious illness doctor, and my husband, Imran Malek, a recent law school graduate with a years of experience in software application engineering, to form an ad hoc oversight committee. And just like that, the Covid-19 Dispersed Volunteer Research Network was born.
We decided to formally