We recently received this note from Otto Olafsson '19 who has wasted no time getting started on the "make significant contributions to society" portion of the MBA mission statement.
I am currently a sophomore at Brown University double majoring in Public Health and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. After seeing how the COVID pandemic was gravely impacting minority communities and communities historically left behind/neglected by the US government, I decided to take a semester off from Brown to see where I could volunteer to help and be a part of the solution. After countless cold calls and emails to different public health departments and internships, I finally got in contact with a project out of Puerto Rico in December, 2020.
I received an internship opportunity to work on a CDC study that partnered with the medical school there, the Ponce Health Sciences University (PHSU) that had been conducting a 12 month, longitudinal study on COVID in Ponce, Puerto Rico’s second largest city. At the time, it was the United States’ only longitudinal study of the virus, and the method in which we studied COVID was that 1,000 participants each took a weekly COVID nasal swab and filled out an accompanying questionnaire that asked about behavioral habits such as mask use, social distancing, and the like.
Our team consisted of about a dozen employees from the CDC and the medical school who each shared similar responsibilities in collecting the samples, logging the information, and safely packaging the nasal swabs into these large, red biohazard bags to be sent to the CDC labs in Atlanta, Georgia for testing. The team came from many different backgrounds and countries, but I was the only person from the mainland US. Although my contact with the CDC was throughout the semester, I was only in Ponce working with the CDC for all of February and March.
During my two months there, I had an unforgettable experience living alone and immersing myself in a culturally rich community with the great fortune to aid in the historic endeavor to end this pandemic. Working in the field every day in Ponce opened my eyes to the disparities ingrained in our healthcare system especially in times of crisis when that very system is strained. From everything to accessible testing to vaccine distribution, the disparities between Nashville and Ponce regarding access were shocking. While vaccine hesitancy, particularly in rural areas of Tennessee, causes vaccines to go unused here, elderly people would arrive at the medical school in Puerto Rico before dawn and wait for hours just for the slim chance to get a vaccine if we had any extras. Despite these challenges, the Puerto Rican people amazed me with their resilience, optimism, and care for the common good of everyone on the island. As they did with Hurricane Maria in 2017, Puerto Ricans will also emerge from these difficult times stronger than ever.