Opinion: The U.S. needs to engage communities around BIPOC data
Nearly 170 years ago, a physician who had been born into a poor family used data to stop a cholera epidemic in London’s then-marginalized Soho neighborhood. By interviewing residents and plotting the locations of those who were ill on a simple map, John Snow, today seen as one of the founders of modern epidemiology, identified a shared water well as the source of cholera. Removing the pump handle, which stopped the epidemic by cutting off the supply of contaminated water to the community, is one of epidemiology’s legendary stories.
Although the scope of the Covid-19 pandemic is magnitudes larger than that historic cholera outbreak, those most affected by it are marginalized people. And just as data enabled Snow to ask and answer the right questions to solve a problem, collecting data has similarly helped countries around the world fight the pandemic. But there is a big gap: lack of data representing communities of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC).
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