INCITE/CCOHR receives grant from NSF to compile and archive COVID-19 chronicles and oral histories

SECOND AVENUE IN MANHATTAN - BRYAN DERBALLA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES - MARCH 30, 2020, “NEW YORK WAS NOT DESIGNED FOR EMPTINESS”

The COVID-19 pandemic is the gravest public health crisis the United States has faced since the Influenza pandemic of 1918. It will not be the last. While disaster research is often retrospective by necessity, providing accounts of past actions and ongoing recoveries, COVID-19 presents an opportunity for social research in the middle of an unfolding crisis. This can give us new insight into risk perception and sensemaking under duress, community and organizational resilience, transformations in social structure, and real time adaptations to severe economic and social disruption. To that effect, we are pleased to announce INCITE has received a RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation to capture and archive the evolving, multi-dimensional impact of the COVID-19 crisis on New York City.

The RAPID grant allows us to continue the work we began weeks ago: collecting surveys, interviews, and written testimonials to create a contemporaneous record of the city’s battle with COVID-19 across the epidemic curve. New York is a critical site for understanding the course of this pandemic because it was an early epicenter of the disease in the U.S., because it has a robust municipal emergency management system with deep experience of past disasters health-related and otherwise, and because it is home to one of the nation’s strongest urban healthcare systems. We must rigorously document this emergency to better understand how it is unfolding, to better inform the recovery, and to learn lessons that will aid our fight against the next pandemic. This project does exactly that, by capturing a diversity of perspectives over the course of the pandemic, from its early stages to the time when it inevitably recedes.

If you are interested in contributing to the archive or have questions, please email covid19archive@gmail.com.