Eyes on the Prize: Lessons on user-centered design from pandemic response work

Transcript (and see slides)

I have a question for you all. How many of you have worked in what you considered a high-stakes, high-stress environment? Like, “Oh man, I need to finish this thing I’m working on RIGHT NOW and I can’t fail!”

How many of you feel like you’re in one of those environments right now? Anybody here still at Twitter, for instance?

Don’t worry, I got you. This is a 50-minute pep talk.

“Move fast, break things.” We’ve all heard this, and we think we know what this means. The more frequently we ship, the more we iterate, and the faster we’ll get to where we envisioned we’d go. And the more we can give the user, or consumer, what they want.

It all sounds great, on paper.

In real life, it means sprint deadlines that come around again and again. It means having the pressure to ship something every few weeks.

In that environment, it’s easy to lose sight of our users. Sometimes we don’t even know if what we’re shipping is actually the most impactful thing we could be working on.

But it sure feels like everything is high-stakes!

I know a little something about that, which is one way of putting it.

I was the sole content designer embedded into San Francisco’s COVID Command Center. I worked out of Moscone Convention Center, just half a mile south of here, from April 2020 through June 2021. Basically the entire pandemic. I was the person essentially translating the legalese public health order into readable content on SF.gov.

But I have not been on COVID for over a year now, and I’ve found that there have been quite a number of things that I’ve learned from those COVID times that has turned out to be useful. Even when the project at hand is not nearly as dire as what COVID was. Working on San Francisco’s COVID response drastically changed the way that I work in general.

Turns out, nothing clarifies like a crisis. We all learn about the “ideal” work process, whether it be agile or the double diamond, or Six Sigma or what have you. Supposed rules about how things are supposed to be done.

When your back is against the wall, and a deadline really looms, that’s when those things are tested. You really look at your processes and consider if they’re making the kind of impact they should be making.

Which is why I consider this a talk about operations. But not in the traditional, “DevOps, DesignOps” sense. At the COVID Command Center, our processes changed weekly. But the biggest ops lessons I learned were about the way that I worked.

Kevin M. Hoffman, back at An Event Apart DC 2019, defined operations as, “normalizing stuff to achieve a goal.”

He didn’t mention where that stuff had to be.

When we talk about ops, we usually mean processes between people. I guess that would be “inter-ops.” (I never said I was a clever writer, I’m a clear and direct one.) DevOps, DesignOps, PeopleOps, etc. How you set guidelines and standards between different people to work together well.

What I want to talk about today is “intra-ops,” normalizing a different way of thinking within yourself. This changes how you approach problems, and it affects how you make decisions.

Let’s get started.

But first, a little context! How it all began.

If you are a full-time employee at the City and County of San Francisco, you are what they call a Disaster Service Worker, or a DSW. That means, if there is an emergency, they can request you be taken out of your regular role for 2 weeks, and put into a role to help in that emergency. Usually at what they call the “Emergency Operations Center,” a group pulled from various City departments to just work on the emergency at hand. Eventually the “emergency operations center” for COVID became the “COVID Command Center” because this was unlike any emergency that we’d ever done.

Naturally, in the Bay Area, we imagine a major earthquake first. Maybe we’d be taken out of our techie roles and trained to pull people out of rubble. Before COVID, we had that hypothesis about being a disaster service worker, but figured that we’d never find out. Little did we know!

In this case, SF Digital Services got a request in early March 2020, after the Mayor had declared a state of emergency. At first glance, it seemed that what they wanted was someone to just post stuff on a website. “To continue developing, updating, and disseminating public information to various audiences…”

Naturally, we thought we could do better than a “website manager” aka “webmaster” So we sent a visual designer and a content strategist.

This is the room we were in. Our visual designer Scott and the rest of the graphics team created so many graphics for so many initiatives, that we had to put them all up on the walls like this so we would know what was available and current for campaigns that we were working on.

It was a whole ecosystem, coming from a bunch of people in a big room, knowing that our words would be seen or read or heard on various platforms across the entire city.

And we were part of an even bigger ecosystem, which I will talk more about later.

This is a photo of one of the morning COVID Command huddles where everyone went into what we called the mission control room to get the latest updates and developments.

From Moscone, everyone working on COVID response steered the city through an unprecedented time. Nobody had ever done anything like this before, and we had been all thrown together to work on a once in 2-lifetimes pandemic.

Okay so, there was clearly a lot happening! In a high-stress, high-stakes environment, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed with imposter syndrome. Who am I to do this job?

Now, I don’t necessarily believe in some overly romantic notion of fate. I don’t believe that there’s necessarily a reason why things are happening to you.

But I believe in making the most of wherever you find yourself. Your experience, your set of skills, your personality, the people you know. The combination of all of those factors is what you carry with you right here, right now. What can you leverage in your current situation?

Intra-ops lessons number 1. Know yourself. Identify your strengths.

So there I was at the COVID Command Center, current SF.gov content designer, former molecular biologist, eternally hopeless multitasker. What could I bring to the table there?

First and most obviously, my biology background. I generally understood how nuanced biological processes were. That would help me better explain the public health messaging around COVID, especially if I worked with the public health experts.

Being familiar with SF.gov, the new citywide website, was a matter of being at the right place at the right time…

Being a hopeless multitasker was not as obvious a strength. All of my life, I was told that I needed to focus on just one thing, that I would be more effective that way. But my inability to focus on just one thing was actually a boon working on COVID response. I didn’t bat an eye when new updates came in every hour.

Because of that very special combination of skills, characteristics, and experience, it was clear that my biggest impact could be made in translating the public health orders for the general public on SF.gov.

Knowing what you are good at means you will be able to verbalize what you will focus on doing. Have a personal mandate.

I came up with a very clear mandate for my work. My job was to make sure information about the public health order on SF.gov is accessible, accurate, and actionable.

I took hundreds of pages, stemming from the health order, directives, and public health guidance, and I content designed it to meet people where they were.

Having that mandate meant that I was not available to write copy for press releases, social media posts, flyers, or anything that wasn’t going to go on SF.gov. Especially FAQs. Ugh.

Luckily, there were enough people from up high at the COVID Command Center who agreed with that, and it gave me a lot of cover.

It gave me the space to do work that only I could do, with the most impact: Use content on SF.gov to tell the public to do things they’ve never done before and to understand why they need to do those things.

Anything else, I would delegate.

Knowing that I was the singular person translating public health orders to plain language for the official city website, that’s a lot of pressure! It’s too easy to get overwhelmed thinking about everything you could be doing, if you believe the entire shebang rests on your shoulders. I even heard, “If something happens to Anita, SF is screwed!”

I had to assess the risks. Think through the absolute worst case scenario. What would happen if I wrote the wrong thing? What would happen if I failed? Or got hit by a bus?

Well….actually, not that much, in the big scheme of things. The health orders would still go on. They would just be uploaded onto the website as PDFs, which...granted, is objectively not good. It’s not accessible, it’s not user-centered at all. I went to battle every day to make sure the public never had to read these PDFs to get the information they needed.

But to be quite honest, this is pretty much what every other jurisdiction was doing anyway. So SF.gov would be at baseline with every other government website about COVID response.

Not great, but also not the end of the world. Everything I’d be doing would be additive.

But taking some pressure off yourself also gives you the space to do things right.

Now that you know what the risks are, you can mitigate those risks. How? A UX practitioner would say research!

Now, those of you in UX have always heard that if you aren’t talking to users, you aren’t doing UX. And I was ashamed for a long time, that when I was doing COVID work, I pretty much was not talking to users directly.

It wasn’t until I learned about the concept of UX theater by Tanya Snook, that I finally accepted my decision was the right one. There’s a poster about this and you should download it!

What is UX theater? It’s when you do UX without a single user, or you include users merely for show.

I had to watch out for the second one. Why? Because everything we did was on a hard deadline. Even if we had tested something and it didn’t test well, it wouldn’t matter. The health order would still go up when it was announced it would go up.

You have to ask yourself, if we aren’t willing to block the release of this feature if people aren’t successfully using it, why are we even bothering to do this research? You’re wasting everybody’s time.

When I was working on the cannabis business permit application, you bet that we did usability tests on the form. If our target audience could not get through the form or provide useful answers, we were willing to delay the official launch. That’s imperative.

Okay so if we can’t do user research well, what can we do?

Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, says the most important thing isn't whether an organization is "doing research" but whether it's learning what it needs to learn to make good decisions.

So, everything I did at the COVID Command Center was on a deadline. Sometimes we only had a day before a big health order update. Trying to do pre-launch testing would be a waste of everybody’s time and efforts.
Instead, I focused on what I needed to learn to make good decisions about approaching SF.gov’s content strategy around COVID.

I’d need to learn about existing communication guidelines. Sure it was a once-in-2-lifetimes pandemic, but surely someone somewhere would have something.

I needed greater context around COVID policies and science. I knew that SF.gov did not exist in a vacuum, so I had to be aware of what the total COVID response ecosystem was like.

And lastly, I needed to evaluate our work after it had been launched, so I could do better next time.

For existing communication guidelines, turns out that the CDC has a whole manual for crisis and emergency risk communications. I read this thing and I took a Coursera course about it. It greatly influenced the way that I approached writing about reopening and vaccines.

For getting more context, I started binging on podcasts like In The Bubble hosted by healthcare advisor Andy Slavitt. And I really got to exercise my science brain listening to This Week in Virology, hosted by Dr. Vincent Racaniello and other virologists. I actually still listen to TWiV for fun, which is how you know I’m a real science nerd.

I also read everything by Zeynep Tufekci, Ed Yong, and Dr. Julia Marcus in the Atlantic and on their Twitter feeds. And I got a local feel from UCSF’s own Dr. Bob Wachter.

I filled my brain with all this context, so that when I had a public health update challenge, I’d know how to frame it.

Lastly, I evaluated comprehension mostly through feedback loops like the social media or 311 liaisons, but turns out, this is also a great way of using Twitter! I saved a search for “sf.gov” and every day, would see what people said about the content.

On a pretty regular basis, I found people tweeting nuances of the rules to each other, which was pretty fantastic. Strangers, reporters even, would use content I wrote to help each other.

The thread on the right was actually tweeted by an LA Times reporter who was using my page on SF.gov as a source of info. Who knew you could use Twitter like this, eh?

The next level of work comes from the people around you. You cannot do impactful work in a high-stress, high-stakes environment on your own. Intraops lesson number 3: Join a coalition.

Now I want to sit with this a little bit before I give you a call to action.

I’m sure you’ve all seen this. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Nice sentiment, but I have some qualms with it.

Like, how do you even know if you’re going in the right direction if you’re alone? You could be going somewhere real wrong, real fast!

I guess if you go fast, if you find out you’re lost, you can double back faster? But that’s still wasted time and effort that you can’t get back.

The answer is always to go together.

When you’re really stressed, it’s hard! When we’re stressed, our first reaction is to look inwards. We focus on what’s right in front of our faces, and forget to look outwards. Other stuff doesn’t exist at all. This is actually a biological process, the stress response. Pumping out stress hormones is something your body just does, naturally.

It results in tunnel vision, and it’s what saves our lives when we need to get out of a situation ASAP. Fight or flight. But, that’s not sustainable when you’re just in it, all the time. If you’re always in that fight or flight mindset, those stress hormones start to mess you up.

You get digestion problems, immunity problems, and eventually cognitive problems. You will not thrive like that. Your work will suffer too, by the way. And I know this because I studied stress hormones (in birds!) for my senior thesis. Yup, former biologist, bringing the science!

We need to look outward and connect with others. That is how we can thrive in a stressful environment.

Instead of “I need to finish this project,” it becomes “We can solve this problem, together.”

This was a radical shift to how I had approached work up until COVID, to be quite honest with you. Both my parents were software engineers, and they had always talked about how awful “office politics” were. Meetings only got in the way of debugging or creating algorithms. I even majored in biology in college because I figured that was a good way to avoid “office politics.” And now I work in government, haha.

You see, it wasn’t until I worked in the COVID Command Center that I truly internalized...

Other people are not obstacles to you getting your work done. Other people are how the work gets done.

It’s not even, “I need to get feedback from someone about this page that I wrote.” It’s more “I need to learn about what this problem is so that I can figure out if a webpage is even the right solution.”

Can you have a design ops talk without the double diamond? I don’t think you can.

But here you can see in an ideal world, there’s equal space devoted to understanding the problem, then creating the solution.

In a high-stress environment, the process starts to look like this. We devote a lot more time and effort into creating the solution, than in understanding the problem. Getting to the solution is what we’re focused on.

And when you come to a project with your mind set about what you’re working on, it’s limiting. The extent of your impact is what you yourself can do. And it assumes that your user is encountering your product or service in a vacuum. It assumes that you know all the variables, that you can account for everything. You’re kinda trapped around the solution you’ve set your mind on.

That’s the tunnel vision, right? It focuses on the thing right in front of your face.

What working on COVID taught me, was that I had to keep the understanding stage open as long as possible. I had to work with others and get their knowledge and input. And when it came time to create a solution, I could bang it out right away.

This let me be truly agile, which was needed a few times!
For example, there was one day in August 2020. Testing had been our main messaging for weeks, and we had kinda settled in on it. Then I heard rumblings that morning that testing supply was running low. I also heard that SF’s Health Officer, the person deciding on and signing the health orders, was going to be more specific on what types of masks would be allowed.

I started preparing by inventorying the pages that would need to change, if we were going to go all in on masks. I’d done a lot of research around behavior change and content strategy. And when we got word later that day that our official message was going to be about masks, I was able to publish a bunch of high-visibility pages in a few hours.

I was able to contribute to our wider initiative right away. That is what being in a coalition means.

And the truth is, UX does not have a monopoly on connecting with people who use a product or service.

What we think of as “UX” - and all of the work that entails - revolves around consumers. And I don’t mean people who just buy products, but people who consume products and services. They just take it in. All of our interactions with them are informed by that framing.

That also means that our viewpoint is limiting. What are we missing when we only see the people that we design for as consumers?

Like Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher wrote in Design for Real Life, make space for real people. The people you design for will have experiences and circumstances that you cannot even begin to imagine. How can you account for that?

This is where your coalition comes in. People who have different experiences and networks often have connections that you are lacking. Learning from them about the people you want to design for, can be part of your discovery.

This is part of what SF’s COVID-19 response entailed. First, public health policy leads everything, made official by the health officer’s signature on the health order. And then it’s operations all the way up. Plus sitting in a sea of whatever the federal and state response is going to be!

The stuff that I was involved in - website and graphics - are only a teeny tiny part of this giant iceberg of effort. It’s often the most visible piece, but it’s built upon all this work that so many other people were doing.

At the COVID Command Center, we had groups whose job it was to connect and do outreach with various San Franciscans. A group who worked with business owners. A group who worked with healthcare workers. A group who worked with community based organizations, or shelters, or schools. A group who went out into the field passing out posters and fliers, who talked to essential workers and folks just out in the street. Not to mention the social media and 311 teams, constantly collecting feedback.

We also had the first equity committee at any emergency operations center anywhere ever. Their job it was to make sure COVID policies were equitable, and they worked across all the silos and levels to get there.

I was able to talk to anyone involved in any of these initiatives. And they helped inform my understanding of who I was writing for.

This is an example of what can be done if all the levels are working together. Extremely technical and complex language, approved at grade 4 reading level so people can actually understand it.

Ask for help. Ask for guidance. It’s not a sign of weakness, it’s a sign that you want to make the work the best that it can be. That you care about it succeeding.

And you know what? If your organization was committed to succeeding, if the work was so high-stakes that it could not fail, then they will give you the means to succeed. If you ask for help, you should get some help.

If that does not happen, if they’re like, “sorry, but you should be able to do this on your own,” then testing you personally is actually more important than the success of the project. In that case, success is not the goal, your suffering is the goal.

Keep that in mind, always.

In the beginning, I would update the website right from the final health order. I wouldn’t get a copy of it until a few hours before it became effective, and then I’d have to figure out what to change on the website. It was hectic, but it was manageable when we were just closing things. That was pretty straightforward.

Reopening things piecemeal got very complicated. For example, for a while, retail stores could only open up to 35% capacity, but grocery stores could open to 50% capacity. Stuff like that. I needed more time to parse the information and figure out what pages I needed to change on the website.

I told the COVID Command leadership, “It would really be nice to know earlier what was changing so I won’t have to scramble quite so much on writing the day before, or the morning of” and was invited to dissemination meetings where DPH staff aligned amongst themselves about what was reopening, from draft health orders. It was the step just before the health order became official. I had gotten into the club.

And then when it came to reopenings that seemed arbitrary to a non-public health person like me, I figured I needed more even more context so I could develop better explanations. I asked if it was possible to get even more lead time.

And I got invited to clinical policy meetings. It’s where a group of DPH clinicians discussed primary scientific research about masks, ventilation, vaccines, the latest transmission data, everything COVID. And then they discussed what to reopen in San Francisco. That’s public health policy. That was where everything began. I listened in, got a sense of where their heads were at, and was able to take it back to the work that I did.

To my knowledge, I was the only content designer in the entire country who had this kind of access. It meant that San Francisco cared about me succeeding at my job, to give all of San Francisco accessible information about what to do during the pandemic.

We were all on the same team, even with vastly different skills and expertise. But we all had our eyes on the prize. Saving as many lives as possible.

If your organization truly cares about success, if you ask for help, they will give you that help.

Not only should you ask for help, but you should also give back, by having each other’s backs.

It’s the only way you’re all going to get through this. Use your unique skills and abilities to make someone’s job easier. We will all go further this way.

As I’ve mentioned before, the website and graphics were a tiny part of the entire response. But it also was the most visible.

SF.gov in particular was at the intersection of communications and operations around the entire response. That gave me the opportunity to set public expectations around things like vaccines, contact tracing, and testing.

Setting proper expectations helped the people on the front lines, who were interacting directly with the public. I talked constantly with our social media lead Sarah Peters, and 311 liaison Nick Poon. I gave them intel, and in turn, they gave me feedback about what was happening on the ground, so to say.

Even though there was no time for proper user research most of the time, I was getting feedback from our audience very quickly!

And then I took that feedback to the decision makers who could actually improve things. It was truly a symbiotic relationship. We were all trying to make each other’s jobs easier.

It resulted in communications that was consistent across different platforms, making our message stronger and more trustworthy. Everything we communicated, we said in one voice, with one message.

Lastly, honor humanity. Which includes yourself, because you’re a human too. Gauge your impact.

So I want to talk about burnout. I remembered to add this bit to the talk embarrassingly late in the game, because I personally don’t have a burnout story. I was activated at the COVID Command Center on April 2, 2020 and was deactivated when it was dismantled and we left Moscone on June 30, 2021. I worked on vaccine content during my entire pregnancy. And I kept on asking myself, “Am I burning out and just not noticing it? I still feel good about what I doing, I’m still energized. Am I missing something?”

I mean yes, I am a workaholic multitasker who can survive on very little sleep, that’s true! But there was something about the pandemic work that got me thinking about the nature of burnout.

Burnout, I realized, is just not about the sheer number of hours you’re working. You can be working part-time hours but still feel burnt out.

The biggest factors that contribute to burnout, I believe, are our impact and the support we feel we can get. If we have both of those, then we feel good about our work.

If we put in a lot of effort alone but see nothing come of it, it’s no wonder we become demoralized.

I saw that fairly infrequently at the COVID Command Center. In fact, I knew several people who requested to be transferred to the COVID work full time than go back to what they were doing before. The work was hard, but it was impactful, it was fulfilling, and we did it together.

It’s not just focusing on yourself to set boundaries. You can’t meditate yourself into a better, more supportive work environment. External things have to change too.

If you’re not feeling like you’re making an impact or getting enough support, you have to point that out somehow. And if you don’t feel comfortable asking for it, that definitely says something about where you’re working. I know that not everyone has the privilege of getting another role, but at the very least, know that it isn’t you.

Know that you have the power to determine if the work you’re doing is worthy of you. Give yourself the opportunity to make the most of where you are.

If you need help with this, I highly recommend joining HmntyCntrd. Founded by Vivianne Castillo, the courses and events have really opened my eyes to what is possible when we expand our care. Not only for the end user, but how the act of creation can also be human-centered.

I’m not an expert in organizational structures, but I can tell you how it hashed out at the COVID Command Center.

Normally, when you’re activated at an emergency operations center, you’re expected to go hardcore, 12-hour days, all in for 2 weeks. And then you get switched out, because the pace of the work is not expected to be sustainable. I figure this normally works for short-term crises like wildfires, or earthquakes. It started that way for COVID too. I was actually the third content strategist from the Digital Services team to be activated, about a month into the official state of emergency.

And during my initial 2 weeks, the COVID Command leadership were like, “Oh man. This emergency is gonna last a while.” Then they had to change their strategy. No more 12 hour days, we’re back to normal 8 hour days. Not always possible, but we at least tried. Most people rolled out at 5 or 5:30pm. I’m an introvert so I’d savor the quiet moments, leaving at 6:30 sometimes 7pm. I’d almost always be the last one out.

San Francisco’s health officer Dr. Tomas Aragon had his reserved spot in the hallway. His desk, his chair, his charger.

I couldn’t tell you for sure why his spot was in the hallway, but we all got to see him, working in the trenches with everyone else. And like here, you also saw when he was not there, because he was home with his family.

We had a wellness room, sometimes a service dog, boba runs, a big celebration for 1 million vaccine doses, and at the beginning of every all-hands meeting, there would be a moment of silence and wellness time.

And after everything was over, we were all given commemorative challenge coins. Challenge coins are traditionally given out in the military to acknowledge being in the trenches together. In San Francisco, they’ve been distributed after official emergencies, to people who were activated as disaster service workers.

On the podcast 99% Invisible, host Roman Mars described challenge coins as physical proof of hard fought relationships.

These were all little touches to let us know that the leadership saw us. They saw us as human beings doing the best we could in a very unpredictable, stressful situation. Once in two lifetimes pandemic! Unprecedented times.

Whereas, I turned to memes to cope, and they helped everyone embrace the chaos. A huge part of honoring humanity is being able to acknowledge that things just suck!

Most of my regular Digital Services team were not directly part of the COVID response work. And then a good chunk of the team was pulled into vaccines. It was the first time that most of them experienced the frantic pace of changing priorities and information. Constantly pivoting even when you’re trying to work in a proper sprint can be overwhelming.

I kept on telling them, “You gotta embrace the chaos! It’s the only way I’ve survived doing this work for a year!”
Then one of our engineers added the Elmo fire gif as a Slack reacji, and I was like, “Yes! Embody the Elmo! I’m so glad you’re internalizing this!”

So anytime we got a new piece of information that completely blew up our current plan, someone reacted with Elmo fire, we sighed a bit. And then we get to work.

Which leads into my last lesson for you today. Go as one.

These are a number of folks that I worked with at the COVID Command Center. This isn’t everybody. This was whoever we could grab for a big group picture at the celebration for our very very last day in Moscone. Before Delta and omicron, which is why you see no masks. The good times.

There are a lot of people here I worked closely with, but I just want to point out the folks I’ve mentioned in this talk.

For the year and a half that I was on COVID work, I could count on anyone here to help. And I’d jump in to help anybody if I could.

We had our own personal mandates, but we also had our wider mission. To save lives by giving people information they would need to stay safe. We all rallied around the public health policies, aligned on the messaging, then used our skills and abilities to take that as far as we could go. The folks here designed more than 8,800 graphics, wrote social media posts, translated more than 5,200 pieces of content, fielded a bunch of reporters with more than 250 media events, worked with community-based organizations and businesses including 650 webinars. And I got to make sure their work was reflected on the website.

We might fail together, but we also succeed together. Keep your eyes on the prize.

I originally chose the title of this talk because I needed a way to summarize large numbers of people using their skills to go in the same direction.

Turns out, it was more appropriate than I expected. Keep your Eyes on the Prize is a gospel song that became influential during the civil rights movement.

Here’s Len Chandler, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, The Freedom Singers and Theodore Bikel performing the song together live at The March on Washington in 1963.

After hearing the song, some of the lyrics struck me.

The only thing I did was wrong
Stayin' in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

The only thing we did was right
Was the day we started to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on

When hundreds of city employees came together to work on this once in 2 lifetimes pandemic, we had no idea what each day would bring. We had no idea how it would end, nor how long it would take. We also didn’t know if we or our loved ones would get sick, it was all a mystery then. But we could lean on each other, and go through it together.

It means that we got to be a part of this. Dr. Bob Wachter’s COVID chronicles on Twitter have been a constant source of hope when things were not looking great. He’d been comparing death rates. Back in March, if the US mirrored SF’s COVID mortality rate, more than 663,000 Americans would be alive today. As of a month ago, that number is more than 675,000.

That is staggering. It boggles my mind, that we’ve managed to do this, and that I was a part of it.

Going through this experience has made me an even more steadfast optimist. If a group of hundreds of people could work on something like this while centering our humanity, what else could we do?

So what did we learn today?

1. Know yourself. Identify your strengths. Have a personal mandate.
2. Get some perspective. Assess the actual risks. Mitigate the risks with impactful research.
3. Join a coalition. Ask for help. Have each other’s backs.
4. Honor humanity. Gauge your impact. Go as one.

And may you always remember, that you’re not alone.

Thank you.