Minor in Health Studies - Pandemic! A Real time Simulation Course in Pandemic Management INTD 4015   Pandemic! A Real time Simulation Course in Pandemic Management
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Viruses are everywhere. Best thought of as packages of genetic material that exploit another organism’s metabolism in order to reproduce, they have adapted to attack every organism that exists. For human beings, viruses have caused a litany of epidemics: small pox, measles,influenza, HIV, SARS, Ebola, and now COVID-19. Viruses strip down life itself to the bare essentials and it's replication. They gain opportunity when the target organism becomes overly common, and leaves a window of vulnerability open. For COVID-19, a planet of 7 billion humans, of whom many could travel globally in hours and whom many more are clustered in urban settings, was this vulnerability. Currently two major public health policy strategies exist to prevent viruses turning into pandemics: Modern-Day Vaccines & Antiquated Public Health Policy. In this class, we build pandemic management skills of health promotion, disease prevention, and collaboration: three things that viruses struggle against. The COVID-19 pandemic forced every government of the planet, from the municipal to the national, to take unorthodox and extraordinary actions. Public gatherings and social behaviour that was perfectly legal in December 2019 was forbidden by March 2020. The social and economic impacts of self isolation, quarantines and restrictive movements will be felt for years to come. Pandemic playbooks and international guidelines were prepared, and in many cases acted upon, but few governments were prepared to work collaboratively in order to actually prevent the widespread transmission of the COVID-19 virus in the first place. This is a course where students work together to save humanity from the next global pandemic. This course returns to the basics of public health to understand how the social determinants of health matter most in times of pandemics. It is a class that builds collaborative working skills while critically exploring the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. This is conducted through a series of 10 podcast modules, and an active live-time game-based simulation. In this course students will: - Understand the social determinants of health, and why it matters for pandemics. - Gain a thorough comprehension of COVID-19 public policy on a global scale. - Development collaborative team management skills for public health frameworks. - Development collaborative intra-team management skills for public health frameworks.
NOTES: Previously offered as Special Topics -INTD 4002- Pandemic! A Real time Simulation Course in Pandemic Prevention & Management.
FORMAT: Lecture