SC Talk: “COVID-19: A Crisis of Expertise”

Speaker:  Colin Furness, Faculty of Information; Dalla Lana School of Public Health, U of T

Host: Marty Klein

Introducer: Linda Corman

Bio: Colin Furness [MISt PhD MPH MEd(cand)] is an infection control epidemiologist, and assistant professor (teaching stream) in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. He received his PhD in the interdisciplinary field of knowledge management in 2010 and his Master of Public Health in epidemiology from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health in 2014.

He worked in industry for 8 years with a Toronto-based company that specialized in the use of geospatial analysis to track infections both in communities and inside buildings. During this time, he led the development of Ontario’s tuberculosis tracking system, working closely with Ontario Public Health, Toronto Public Health, and Peel Public Health to refine to deepen his understanding of disease transmission in populations. He also led the design of an integrated hardware and software system to track movement of people and equipment in hospitals to measure infection risk. A significant portion of this work focused on automating contact tracing, and automated measure-mentof risky behaviours by patients and staff. This system was piloted at Toronto General Hospital over a two-year period, where he was embedded with the Infection Prevention and Control team, further growing his expertise in risk and mitigation of infection transmission. Colin’s published research from that work focused on hand hygiene behaviour and risk.

Colin has been retained as an expert witness several times in Ontario concerning COVID-19 emergency measures and public safety. He has also been engaged in media commentary on a local and national level with CBC Radio and Television, CTV television news, CTV radio, Global News, CityPulse News, Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, New York Times, and TV Ontario. He has completed more than 1,000 media interviews pertaining to COVID since January 2020.

Abstract: The COVID-19 global pandemic is a problem of enormous scale, complexity, uncertainty, and urgency, creating three obstacles to governments trying to mount an effective response. First, this problem has been oversimplified in the search for solutions, excluding needed expertise. Second, it is not entirely clear what COVID-19 expertise ought to encompass, particularly when experts disagree with each other. Third, we are discovering that the paradigm of evidence-based medicine in public health is not well suited to crises that are both novel and urgent. These obstacles have significant implications for changes to the stature, the structure, and even the epistemology of public health expertise. This talk explores these obstacles, and proposes some ways in which public health might evolve and improve for the next crisis.

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=JsKqeAMvTUuQN7RtVsVSEKo-DHaj3xRAluk2q6EEM7NUM05HU0NKUlpHVkRYUlpPWkRTS0M5VkJTNi4u

The deadline to register is the Wednesday of the talk at 8:00am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only on the morning of the event.