Concerns About the Special Article on Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin in High-Risk Outpatients With COVID-19

The Expert Next Door: Interactions With Friends and Family During the COVID-19 Pandemic

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic thrust the field of public health into the spotlight. For many epidemiologists, biostatisticians, and other public health professionals, this caused the professional aspects of our lives to collide with the personal, as friends and family reached out with concerns and questions. Learning how to navigate this space was new for many and required refining our communication depending on context, setting, and audience. Some of us took to social media, utilizing our existing personal accounts to share information after sorting through and summarizing the rapidly emerging literature to keep loved ones safe. However, those in our lives sometimes asked unanswerable questions, or began distancing themselves when we suggested more stringent guidance than they hoped, causing additional stress during an already traumatic time. We often had to remind ourselves that we are also individuals experiencing this pandemic, and that our time-intensive efforts were meaningful, relevant, and impactful. As this pandemic and other public health crises continue, we encourage our discipline to consider how we can best use shared lessons from this period, and recognize that our professional knowledge, when used in our personal lives, can promote, protect, and bolster confidence in public health.

Will Podcasting and Social Media Replace Journals and Traditional Science Communication? No, but

The digital world in which we live is changing rapidly. The evolving media environment is having a direct impact on traditional forms of communication and knowledge translation in public health and epidemiology. Openly accessible digital media can be used to reach a broader and more diverse audience of trainees, scientists, and the lay public than can traditional forms of scientific communication. The new digital landscape for delivering content is vast, and new platforms are continuously being added. In this article, we focus on several, including Twitter and podcasting, and discuss their relevance to epidemiology and science communication. We highlight 3 key reasons why we think epidemiologists should be engaging with these mediums: 1) science communication, 2) career advancement, and 3) development of a community and public service. Other positive and negative consequences of engaging in these forms of new media are also discussed. The authors of this commentary are all engaged in social media and podcasting for scientific communication, and we reflect on our experiences with these mediums as tools to advance the field of epidemiology.

Open science saves lives: lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic

In the last decade Open Science principles have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly. We provide all data and scripts at https://osf.io/renxy/ .