Opinion: Create a cadre of community health workers to fight Covid-19 in the U.S.
Many Americans have never seen a pandemic or the hardships that accompany it. As best we can tell, #Covid19 will get much worse before it gets better. Community health workers…
Five years ago, I was working in Kono, a district in Sierra Leone, on projects to strengthen and reopen local health systems following the worst Ebola outbreak in history. The tasks included installing a basic electronic health record system in a local clinic, tracing contacts of people diagnosed with Ebola, and stimulating local economies. All of these activities depended on hiring, training, and mobilizing community health workers.
The results of that work impress me to this day. We should learn from them and consider employing them against Covid-19.
In Kono, as in the U.S. today, schools and universities were closed. But there was no infrastructure for online
