In the 1967 film “The Graduate,” the title character played by Dustin Hoffman attends a post-graduation party where a partygoer beckons him from the boisterous crowd and gives him a single word of career advice that has become an iconic cinema quote: “Plastics.”
As COVID-19 retreats in the midwinter, the one word of advice for our scientific community going forward is “surveillance.” The pandemic has forced us to relearn that public health surveillance — maintaining a watchful eye on new COVID-19 variants as well as other bacteria and viruses that threaten us — is the basis for preventing disease outbreaks and controlling them once they occur.
In many ways, public health surveillance is similar to a national government’s intelligence surveillance. Both require a combination of human intelligence and technical sophistication to achieve their purpose. Espionage requires trained agents and high-tech equipment; public health demands expert health care personnel and advanced molecular diagnostic methods. Most important, in both cases, keeping citizens safe takes a global effort.
