THENEWYORKER,M AY4, 2020 19
had been chosen carefully: “You have to
think about managing the public’s emo-
tions, perceptions, trust. You have to
bring them along the path with you.”
Since then, Washington State politicians
have largely ceded health communica-
tions to the scientists, making them
unlikely celebrities. “Hey people!! Jeff
Duchin is the real deal,” one fan tweeted.
A newspaper hailed him as “a bespec-
tacled, calming presence.”
Constantine told me that he under-
stands why politicians “want to be front
and center and take the credit.” And
he noted that Seattle has many of “the
same problems here you see in Con-
gress, with the partisanship and toxic-
ity.” But, he said, “everyone, Republicans
and Democrats, came together behind
one message and agreed to let the sci-
entists take the lead.”
By the time Seattle’s schools were
formally closed, on March 11th, students
and teachers were already abandoning
their classrooms. The messaging had
worked: parents were voluntarily keep-
ing their kids home. Cell-phone track-
ing data showed that, in the preceding
week, the number of people going to
work had dropped by a quarter. Within
days, even before Washington’s gover-
nor, Jay Inslee, issued official work-from-
home orders, almost half of Seattle’s work-
ers were voluntarily staying away from
their offices. When bars and restaurants
were officially closed, on March 15th,
many of them were already empty. Con-
stantine himself had been working from
home for a week. He was giving inter-
views all day, and always underscored
to reporters that he was speaking from
his bedroom, and that the noises in the
background were coming from his chil-
dren, who were home from school. After
he heard that the county’s basketball
courts were still being heavily used, he
ordered them closed.
The county had bought a motel to
house homeless residents who tested
positive for the coronavirus. When one
homeless man at the motel, who was
asymptomatic, left to buy a beer, Con-
stantine immediately went to court, so
that police could arrest him the next
time he went out. The man’s actions had
posed little risk: he had gone to a gas
station across the street, then returned.
But, Constantine told me, “the fact is
some people are not going to follow the
rules—and we need to show everyone
there are consequences.”
Today, Washington State has less than
two per cent of coronavirus cases in the
U.S. At EvergreenHealth, hospital ad-
ministrators have stopped daily crisis
meetings, because the rate of incoming
patients has slowed. They have empty
beds and extra ventilators. The admin-
istrators remain worried, but are cau-
tiously optimistic. “It feels like we might
have stopped the tsunami before it hit,”
Riedo told me. “I don’t want to tempt
fate, but it seems like it’s working. Which
is what makes it so much harder when
I look at places like New York.”T
he Epidemic Intelligence Service
was founded in 1951, when Ameri-
can troops in Korea began experiencing
fevers, aches, vomiting, and fatal hem-
orrhages. Some three thousand soldiers
fell ill, leading military leaders to con-
clude that Chinese-backed Communists
had weaponized bacteria. “The planning
of appropriate defensive measures must
not be delayed,” an epidemiologist at a
new federal agency, the Communicable
Disease Center, declared. He proposed
a new division, named to evoke the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency. But when the
first class of E.I.S. officers landed in Korea
they found that the fevers were not caused
by a crafty enemy. Soldiers, it turned out,
had been accidentally consuming rodentfeces. In later conflicts, generals were in-
structed to use thicker food-storage bags
and to set more rat traps.
E.I.S. officers became known as “dis-
ease detectives.” In 1952, one of them
studied a group of children in a Chi-
cago slum who had all developed simi-
lar symptoms—muscle weakness, spasms,
joint pain—but had tested negative for
likely diseases. When the E.I.S. officer
visited one of the children’s homes, he
noticed a toddler chewing on chips of
paint that had flaked off a windowsill.
The paint chips were soft because they
contained lead, which is toxic. A year
later, that E.I.S. officer helped found the
country’s first poison-control program,
which taught parents that the first prin-
ciple of safety was communication. The
program advised parents to tell their
children not to put paint chips in their
mouths, and to signal the dangers of
bleach, insecticide, and cleaning chem-
icals by storing them on high shelves.
E.I.S. alumni went on to take pow-
erful health-care jobs across the coun-
try. “Nearly ninety per cent of E.I.S.
graduates embark on public-health ca-
reers at the local, state, federal or inter-
national level,” a 2001 study found. Four
former C.D.C. directors are E.I.S. alumni;
half a dozen graduates have served as
the U.S. Surgeon General.
When the coronavirus pandemic
started, E.I.S. alumni began working“Tell me about that thing under it.”