Brigid Halliday And Jaden Weinstein Oral History, 2021/12/10

In this interview, the focus will be less about your experiences in the pandemic (although your experience in college during the pandemic is certainly something that you might want to talk about) and more about the ways learning about past pandemics has or has not affected your attitude toward, or perception of, the current pandemic.

December 10, 2021 14:00:00

Jaden Weinstein

Brigid Halliday

Brigid Halliday

Northeastern University

Oral History

English Education--Universities

past pandemics

public health

pandemic class

university

college

Healthcare

12/10/2021

03/28/2022

03/29/2023

07/13/2023

12/10/2021

Jaden Weinstein

Brigid Halliday

audio

English

06:05

In this interview, the focus will be less about your experiences in the pandemic (although your experience in college during the pandemic is certainly something that you might want to talk about) and more about the ways learning about past pandemics has or has not affected your attitude toward, or perception of, the current pandemic.

Jaden Weinstein 0:03
Hello, my name is Jaden Weinstein.

Brigid Halliday 0:06
And I'm Brigitte Halliday.

Jaden Weinstein 0:08
And in this podcast we will be talking about how pandemics compare to the current COVID-19 pandemic. I'd first like to ask if you give consent to be interviewed for the COVID-19 archive project and can you please state the date and time?

Brigid Halliday 0:22
I consent to being interviewed, and it is December 10, 2021 at 2pm.

Jaden Weinstein 0:28
I will now be asking Brigid some questions. First, I'd like to start by asking how is learning about other pandemics helped or not helped you put this pandemic into context?

Brigid Halliday 0:38
I think it was really interesting learning about other pandemics and seeing that even after knowing the history and knowing how many people have experienced this kind of thing before, people really maintained a superiority complex almost, and really had the impression that it couldn't ever happen to them, even though the biological pattern of pandemics has really occurred quite regularly throughout the existence of humanity. But I think that once the world kind of shut down, and people were at home and maybe had a little bit more free time to spend some time learning about previous pandemics, it helped got a lot of people to acceptance, knowing that so many people had faced the same struggles in the past.

Jaden Weinstein 1:21
Yeah, I definitely agree with you with that. Now, I'd like to ask whether or not humans have learned from prior experience with the pandemic?

Brigid Halliday 1:30
Yeah, I think part of the problem with carrying over lessons from previous pandemics has just been that sometimes they're really long time gaps between a lot of the big major ones, like, for example, this 1918, flu and then COVID-19, it was like, nearly a century, so or it was a century. So I think that it can be difficult for those lessons to kind of translate across generations. But I also think that a big problem lies in the fact that many individuals are so uneducated about the repetitive, like historical nature of pandemics and the biological factors in that. So I think if we start to educate societies about the sort of inevitability of pandemics, it'll direct more attention to lessons that need to be learned to improve our responses in the future instead of just trying to eliminate them altogether.

Jaden Weinstein 2:22
Yeah, that definitely makes sense. I would now like to end by asking, what would you consider the most important lesson that needs to be taken away from COVID-19?

Brigid Halliday 2:31
I think that it'll be very important to recognize mistakes that were made during the COVID-19 pandemic and to admit that there were mistakes made, so that we can really move on to acceptance and learning from them in the future. I think that one of the biggest problems that we had was that differing perspectives and motives between health officials and government officials created a very inefficient divide in leadership, which really turned the pandemic into a political opinion, instead of a danger to all of society, regardless of party and class. So I think that's probably the biggest area that I would name that needs improvement to, to prevent tragedy in the future.

Jaden Weinstein 3:13
Yeah, I definitely agree.

Brigid Halliday 3:15
Okay, so I will now be asking Jaden if he gives consent to be interviewed for the COVID-19 archive project?

Jaden Weinstein 3:23
I do give consent.

Brigid Halliday 3:24
Okay. And I will start my portion of the interview asking Jaden questions. Okay, Jaden. So how have past pandemics put the COVID pandemic into context for you?

Jaden Weinstein 3:35
So learning about past pandemics has really caused me to realize how serious disease is when it is considered a pandemic, learning about the different pandemics including smallpox and the black death, it showed me how serious those pandemics are. Part of the reason why smallpox and the black death were so dangerous is because of how easily the disease is transmitted from person to person. Knowing that COVID is also highly contagious, past diseases were, that were highly contagious allows me to put the COVID pandemic into perspective, as I see how dangerous it is being very highly contagious.

Brigid Halliday 4:09
Yeah, I definitely agree that it's super helpful that we have those past pandemics to compare it to. Alright, so how does this pandemic the COVID 19 pandemic compare to past pandemics?

Jaden Weinstein 4:21
So living through the COVID pandemic with our modern, modern government makes me feel a lot safer than past pandemics. Today, our government has done a good job of identifying who has been infected by COVID with all the tests required, and our government has done a good job of causing those people to be isolated. During the past pandemics, the science was not really there to identify everyone who was infected and to isolate them. Although in past pandemics, they did use similar techniques to stop the spread of the pandemic including sanitary cordons and quarantines.

Brigid Halliday 4:53
Yeah, I definitely have enjoyed this semester getting to see the progression of some of the same quarantine measures being developed and kind of hone down so they were made more perfect. Okay, and my last question is how have past pandemics affected your college experience?

Jaden Weinstein 5:14
So looking at pandemics, I learned how important it is to abide by the guidelines that governments have set out. It is important the people being affected by the pandemic all work together as a team and abide by the guidelines in order to stop the spread. Thinking about the past pandemics has caused me to really focus on abiding by the guidelines today's government has made for the COVID pandemic. I make sure I'm always wearing my mask indoors, and if I'm ever feeling sick, I make sure I get tested and quarantine myself.

Brigid Halliday 5:42
That's great. Well, it was really nice talking to you today Jaden and getting to sort of reflect on the semester and everything we've learned about this pandemic and past pandemics.

Jaden Weinstein 5:58
Yeah, it was nice talking to you and learning about your perspective on past pandemics and the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Brigid Halliday 6:04
Thank you for listening.