Stories of COVID-19: Generations, Part 1
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2020
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Each generation is experiencing the pandemic differently. For some, the trauma of the 1918 pandemic still echoes. Others worry about how to balance their own health and responsibilities with concerns about the health of their parents or children. In this episode, we’ll share stories about the impact of COVID-19 across generations.
Our first story is from Mary Sue Kitchen, who was director of the Fairfax County Health Department Laboratory in Virginia for seventeen years from 1995-2012. In Mary Sue’s story, her grandmother's experience of the 1918 pandemic inspires and informs her career in public health. (Find transcripts and photos for each of our stories here: https://www.storycollider.org/stories-of-covid19)
After Mary Sue’s story, our host speaks with Marta Hanson, associate professor of the history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, about how we’ve responded to pandemics of the past.
Stay tuned for two more stories on Monday!
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Transcript
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| 0:43.3 | Hello and welcome back to Story Collider's Stories of COVID-19. I'm your host, Erin Barker, and this is part one of episode five on the theme of generations. |
| 0:50.3 | I don't know about you, but for the past few months, I've been experiencing that surreal feeling of living a moment in history. |
| 0:58.0 | Something you know you will, as the saying goes, tell your grandkids about someday. |
| 1:04.0 | And when I heard our first story today, it made me realize that some of us have already heard stories like these from our grandparents about surviving pandemics. |
| 1:12.6 | And even more than that, some of us are already carrying that weight with us. |
| 1:16.6 | Some of us are already driven by the memory of pandemics past. |
| 1:20.6 | In part one of this episode, we'll hear a story about this, and then we'll talk to science historian Marta Hansen about how we've responded |
| 1:29.3 | to pandemics of the past. Our first story is from Mary Sue Kitchin, who was director of the Fairfax |
| 1:36.4 | County Health Department Laboratory for 17 years. The story was recorded at her home in Vienna, |
| 1:42.4 | Virginia, and was originally developed for a live online show we produced in partnership with the American Public Health Laboratories. |
| 1:59.0 | In January of 2012, I was in Atlanta in the Emergency Operations Center of the Centers for Disease Control |
| 2:11.6 | as part of a special tour arranged for the Board of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. |
| 2:22.2 | I was watching a live worldwide tally of infectious disease on a huge world map at the head of the room. |
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