Release Date: November 17, 2020

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Welcome from the Dean

The last eight months have been frightening, remarkable, revealing, discouraging, and motivating all at once.

The world has faced a pandemic, something that public health experts have been talking about and even preparing for a long time, and yet I venture to guess that few expected that it would actually happen in our lifetimes. As cases and deaths increased in different places and at different times, we struggled (and still struggle) to get the right data and to leverage the public health infrastructure to choose the right policies and evaluate their impacts. Epidemiology has become an everyday word, and epidemiologic concepts are discussed at length in the press, but at the same time we have seen science being questioned and manipulated for political gain.

The pandemic has already killed over a million people worldwide, and this number is likely an underestimate and will continue to increase. Many more have been hospitalized with severe disease. Many millions, especially the poor across the globe, have suffered the dire consequences not only of the infection itself but also the loss of their livelihoods. And yet in the midst of all this glimmers of hope have emerged: in a remarkable show of collective response to protect population health, activities across the world shut down to prevent transmission; societies came together to provide payments for those left without jobs; the CDC issued an order halting evictions as a public health measure; air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions dropped precipitously across the globe; many cities became more walkable and cycling soared. At the same time the pandemic has made more visible than ever the unfairness and injustice inherent in our society: like so many other diseases the virus hit the poor, the marginalized and those affected by a long history of structural racism the hardest. The epidemiology of the pandemic became a mirror in which we can see our society reflected.

And then in June, the murder of George Floyd launched hundreds of thousands into the streets, fed up with inaction, calling for an end to a long, long history of racism against Black people in all its multiple manifestations. Health, of course, is in many ways a barometer of social justice. Martin Luther King Jr. said as much in his famous words, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman.” A growing movement coalesced in support of Black Lives Matter, a movement that many of us feel (and hope) will be sustained and powerful and that will generate real reckoning and real change. Across the United States, counties and cities have begun to declare racism the public health threat and the public health crisis that it is and that it has been for so long. The long tradition of public health scholarship (much of it by Black scholars and scholars of color) that has named racism as a cause of health inequities and documented its impacts is at last receiving the recognition and visibility it deserves.

Over the past eight months the Dornsife School of Public Health community has come together in many ways. We have continued to teach by pivoting quickly to remote delivery and have prepared for an unprecedented new academic year. Our research has not only continued but also expanded to encompass work on COVID-19 and especially inequities in COVID-19. Our faculty, staff and students have continued to support our health department and community groups all over Philadelphia as they deal with the many implications of the pandemic. We have come together building on Dornsife’s historical commitment to health as a human right and to diversity and inclusion to develop and implement an anti-racism action plan and support the vital scholarship, training and advocacy that we need to advance an anti-racist agenda.

In the midst of all this universities like ours struggled to identify the best path forward on issues ranging from the practical and mundane to the transformative: Should students return to campus? How can masking be enforced? Is periodic testing feasible and useful? How can we begin to dismantle structures that reinforce social injustice and become fully anti-racist in our practices and policies? There is much uncertainty and we are only at the beginning of what will be a long and difficult path. But what I have seen in our students, in our staff and in our faculty over the course of these last eight months gives me hope. I know that after reading these pages you will agree.

Ana V. Diez Roux, MD, PhD, MPH
Dean and Distinguished Professor, Epidemiology
Dornsife School of Public Health