Dr. Oxiris Barbot: How Can We Prepare Our Cities to Tackle Pandemics?
It’s been more than a year and a half since the coronavirus pandemic spread across the globe, and while some aspects of the crisis have been brought under control, others remain extremely difficult to manage.
Navigating the pandemic, particularly at its outset, required resourceful experts who could make decisions of enormous consequence with limited data or precedent.
In this episode, we speak to Dr. Oxiris Barbot, who served as Health Commissioner for New York City from 2018 to 2020, about the lessons she learned during those harrowing first months of the pandemic, and the life-saving decisions she was forced to make. Dr. Barbot also walks us through her strategies for countering our ongoing challenges with COVID-19, such as the Delta variant, the logistics of vaccinating young children and how to ensure we consider racial equity in our approach to fighting the pandemic.