Best of the CRANDIC winner: Best Defender of Science
Most people who don’t work in public health first heard of Dr. Eli Perencevich seven months into the pandemic, when the “metrics” (a word Gov. Reynolds repeated endlessly in 2020) underlying the Iowa Department of Public Health’s plan to manage the spread of COVID-19 finally became public.
“Not one of the criteria has anything to do with how the virus spreads,” Perencevich told Zachary Oren Smith, the journalist who got a hold of IDPH’s decision-making matrix, which the Reynolds administration was refusing to make public.
Perencevich is a professor of Internal Medicine and Epidemiology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, as well as a member of the Iowa Infection Prevention Research Group and an expert on mathematical modeling in epidemiology. And just as importantly, he has been willing to speak about COVID and all its complications in language everyone can understand.
“In a lot of ways, Iowa is serving as the control group of what not to do,” Perencevich told The Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey for a December 2020 story on how Iowa’s government decided not to take many basic mitigation steps.
While Perencevich has been a useful expert source for journalists, his tweets have reached thousands of Iowans directly. His feed (@eliowa) features not just his own commentary on public health, along with the occasional tweet about daily life in Iowa City, but also retweets of information and articles that help illuminate the state of the pandemic and possible ways to deal with it.
And, of course, his tweets, like his quotes in news stories, are written in clear, easy-to-understand language.
Little Village Best of the CRANDIC is presented by City of Iowa City.
This article was originally published in Little Village issue 301.
