Leslie Bienen’s guest opinion on Covid in The New York Times
Leslie Bienen, MFA, DVM, Pilot Project Coordinator for BUILD EXITO and faculty at the OSHU-PSU School of Public Health, is co-author with Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease doctor and the director of the Center for AIDS Research at the University of California, San Francisco, of a recent guest opinion in The New York Times. “Why Hospitalizations Are Now a Better Indicator of Covid’s Impact” argues that public health officials should rely more heavily on hospitalizations and less on case numbers to lead policies regarding the pandemic. “Learning to live with the virus in the long term will require changes in both mind-set and policy. Relying on Covid-19 hospitalizations as the most important metric to track closely will provide the most reliable picture of how an area is faring with the virus. And by focusing attention on the number of hospitalizations, health professionals can better focus on reducing them.”