Vivek Murthy

And I think

What has to happen with COVID-19 is we have to make it different this time.

We can't afford to go back into our old lives where we allowed people and relationships to slip to the side in terms of priority.

We've got to keep people back at the center.

When it comes to health care, we can't afford to go back to the way it was working or not working pre-pandemic because we now know just that

The cost was tremendous in terms of dollars and also, most importantly, in terms of lives.

I just want to give you one example.

We know we need technology and it can help us do better, but we can also get fascinated with technology for its own sake and with novel ideas and applications and go down the path of creating something that is intellectually fascinating, but perhaps practically less useful.

Departments of health could sure use some help from

technology companies that have the ability to set up systems to handle data to organize it to set up firewalls to respect privacy and

but they can also allow the larger data analysis that we know is so desperately needed and lacking in the larger public health system.

Local departments of health had their budgets shredded in 2008 during the Great Recession.

And while everything else built up, many of their budgets stayed about the same.

So they have lost so much capacity and a big part of that has been in the realm of technology.

So they have not been able to often modernize.

If you have a case that presents of COVID-19 in your community and somebody has to contact trace,

It's your local department of health.

And they rely on systems and funding and people.

And right now in all of those three areas, they're struggling.

So even though it's not always the most exciting thing to think about building databases that work for local departments of health,