38 | Health Policy Research, Racism, and a Pandemic

On the Evidence

Before March 2020, a search for the keyword “coronavirus” would have turned up zero results on Mathematica’s website. Now the word and its sibling, COVID-19, appear in more than two dozen pages about contact tracing, wastewater testing, disease modeling, workforce planning, and more. Owing to the wide-ranging effects of the novel coronavirus, Mathematica’s experts have sprung into action to understand its implications for primary care, child protective services, behavioral health, remote learning in K-12 education, surging unemployment among workers with disabilities, and food insecurity among children who no longer have access to daily school meals. Although the pandemic is touching almost every conceivable area of public wellbeing, it started as a public health threat and has galvanized Mathematica’s nearly 600 health care and policy experts, researchers, technologists, data scientists, clinicians, survey experts, and program design and management experts to apply their skills and creativity in responding to the crisis. For this episode of On the Evidence, Chris Trenholm, the managing director of health at Mathematica, discusses the impacts of COVID-19 on public health, what the pandemic reveals about the social determinants of health and racial disparities in health care, and how Mathematica’s partners in government, philanthropy, and the private-sector are developing new tools and strategies in light of the pandemic.