About

Home > About

What is COVID Straight Talk

COVID Straight Talk is a public health campaign raising awareness that COVID-19 is airborne and encouraging people to adopt harm reduction measures to keep themselves and their communities safe. The website is a set of bilingual (Spanish and English) guides for workers, employers, and HVAC professionals on reducing the risk of COVID-19 in the workplace, with a strong focus on air safety. The website is filled with practical hacks, posters to hang up, and resources for staying safe for people working indoors.  

We’ve cut through conflicting messaging on COVID-19 safety. We’ve worked with experts on air safety, public health, and disaster response to give you the straight talk on COVID. We’ve translated government and professional issued guidance (CDC, ASHRAE, OSHA). We’ve created a call-to-action for people to “Get M.A.D. and Stay Safe”, based on the acronym M.A.D. which stands for masks (M), keeping indoor air fresh (A), and maintaining physical distance (D).

The site’s Get M.A.D. Survey gives people customized recommendations on how to stay safe. The survey will also generate much-needed data on workers’ experiences. We will open-source the data for policymakers and researchers. If you’re a researcher or you are interested in the data, contact us.

Who Made This

COVID Straight Talk is a project of Last Mile. Last Mile is an entirely volunteer run non-for-profit entity based in NYC whose mission is to protect communities most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Founded in March 2020 during the start of the pandemic in the USA, Volunteers came together to addresses the “last mile” challenges related to COVID-19. Our first program, P.P.E. Now!, is a grassroots P.P.E. distribution groups in infection hotspots across the U.S.A. We’ve now expanded to our second program in public health education with the launch of COVID Straight Talk. We are fiscally sponsored by the Urban Justice Center, one of the most extensive legal service organizations in the United States protecting vulnerable communities

The COVID Straight Talk team comes from a diversity of backgrounds in data, health, and community activism. We all have day jobs in the fields of health, data, communications or design. Despite our different backgrounds, we are united in our mission, which is best captured in this quote by our Content Lead and Project Manager, Ananya Iyengar, an Undergraduate Student in the Northeastern University Honors Program: 

“My goal at Last Mile and through leading the COVID Straight Talk project content is to provide accurate and accessible information on COVID-19 to the public. A better informed public is better able to protect themselves and each other, which is critical to managing this pandemic. There is too much noise in the scientific information being put out about COVID-19, and it needs to be translated into everyday language for it to actually help people. Last Mile’s goal is to be that translator and empower people with the knowledge to keep themselves and others safe.”

CONTENT TEAM

Ananya Iyengar


Project Lead


  

Claire Hsu


Copy Editing

Smita Badhey, M.D.


Medical Advisor, Content


  

Natalie Tee


Medical Advisor


  

Maria Luisa Gambale


Content Advisor


    

Laura S.


Content Strategy

 

DATA TEAM

Bitsy Bentley



Data Designer


  

Josh Feldman


Data Scientist


 

COMMUNITY NETWORKS AND PARTNERSHIPS TEAM

Tricia Wang, Ph.D.


Partnerships


    

Erin Malone


Community Networks, Communications

Diné Butler


Last Mile NOLA PPE Lead


Amy Aminlari, M.D., MPH


Medical Advisor


Last Mile San Diego Founder and Lead


COMMUNICATION AND DESIGN TEAM

Alice Huang


Strategic Communications


Eden Lew


Last Mile Designer


  

Riley Hooker


Covid Straight Talk Visual Designer

 

Kathleen Barretto


Covid Straight Talk Web Designer


  

James Goedert


Last Mile Product Designer


Jenny Chao


Graphic Designer


  

Marcela Musgrove


Social Media


Marc Nakamura


Last Mile Illustrator


D Wang Shi Zhao


Last Mile Illustrator


Wan Jung Hung


Last Mile Illustrator


 

SPANISH TRANSLATION TEAM

Eugenio Fernández Vázquez


Editor


Carmina Christen


Translator


Ron Gonzales


Language Consultant


Manouska Alvarez


Spanish Advisor


Alex Guimaray


Designer


 

OPERATIONS

Christina Tung


Finances and Product


Lijia Gong


Legal Advisor


  

 
 

Why We Made This

COVID Straight Talk was born out of an urgent need to raise awareness that COVID-19 spreads primarily through the air. The toolkits and messaging we have put together are based on a decision to assertively assume that COVID-19 is airborne until proven otherwise, and act accordingly.

The problem is formidable. The danger is clear and present. Not taking immediate and decisive actions now puts both lives and livelihoods at risk. Enclosed, poorly ventilated spaces are hotbeds for community spread of the virus. If not well ventilated, indoor settings–including industrial, institutional, and multi-occupancy home environments–could potentially contribute to overwhelming spikes in COVID-19 cases and deaths.

With people returning to indoor environments for work and school, more people will be spending extended time in close proximity with others and in places with poor ventilation. The risk of transmission rate in poorly ventilated environments is significantly higher than than well ventilated environments. 

  • 3.5 million teachers returning to work and 56.4 million students returning to elementary, middle, and high school in the USA (New York Times)

  • 55 million people are considered to be essential workers in the USA; many work in enclosed, poorly ventilated settings (Economic Policy Institute)

Since the beginning of Last Mile’s founding, we have worked closely with disaster operation expert Nathaniel Raymond, whose work with the city of New Haven took a similar approach of focusing on settings with poor ventilation and prioritizing the most vulnerable and susceptible. The mayor of New Haven created one of the fastest crush curves in the United States by focusing on the reduction of spreading COVID-19 via the air and the most vulnerable populations. We decided to turn that strategy into methodologies to empower workers and employers and to treat air quality as part of a holistic harm-reduction approach. By improving ventilation in all public and workplace settings, we can slow the  virus’s spread and save lives. 

Investing in public health education is just as important as investing in medical and technological solutions. During this pandemic, volunteers must serve as the temporary “bucket brigade” to get critical public health education and/or P.P.E. supplies to family,  friends, and neighbors in our communities. Until global and national public health systems and supply chains are rebuilt, communities must answer this once-in-a-generation call to build a temporary — but critically necessary — human infrastructure to support those on the front lines of this crisis.  

That is why we’ve devoted our time to bringing this to life – because we believe that investing in public health education can have an outsized impact on reducing risk and saving lives.

All of our work is hyper-focused on supporting Essential Workers – in particular Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people – who are already paying the price for being “essential” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

An overwhelming majority of children and teenagers who have died from COVID-19 in the United States were Black or Latinx (APM)

Almost all of the U.S. kids and teens who’ve died from COVID-19 were Latino or Black. (CDC)

1 in 875 Black Americans has already died in this pandemic. This number could grow to 1 in 500 by January. (APM)

 

In addition to wearing Masks and maintaining physical Distance, keeping indoor Air fresh and moving is critical. It’s time to “Get M.A.D. and Stay Safe”.

 

Our Values

Serve those in greatest need

Addressing how racism and socioeconomics shape the risks from and impacts of COVID-19 using a bottom-up, worker-centric, community-based approach is at the core of our work. We prioritize our messaging to speak with, not at, those who have been most affected by the virus: Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other marginalized communities. We create informative, accurate, actionable materials geared toward those who need it the most. 

Pro-livelihood 

We know that not everyone has paid leave or the ability to work from home. We also don’t want to tell people what to do. It’s not realistic to tell people “don’t go back to work” or “how to work from home”. COVID-19 means that everyone has tough choices to make about how to stay safe as we return to work, school, and daily life. We err on the side of caution because lives and livelihoods are at stake. 

Responsible recommendations through positive bias  

We are acting on the positive bias that although, COVID-19 is a new virus, it is acting like other similar respiratory viruses. While most of the COVID-19 prevention messaging has been focused on surface transmission, COVID-19 has demonstrated similarity to SARS in the Amoy Towers Housing Complex in Hong Kong, making transmission through air a vector of transmission that should be addressed with widespread public education. We are also positively biased to prioritize those who are most vulnerable and susceptible to COVID-19.

Harm Reduction 

Successful approaches to mitigating the spread of HIV/AIDS in the 20th century taught us that it is ineffective to tell people what not to do. What works is telling people how to do what they want more safely. It is no different with COVID-19. People need to work indoors, especially during winter. Families want to see each other, especially during the holidays. Daily activities must go on, so people need to learn how to do those things safely. We’re here to make the facts accessible, give actionable insights, and offer affordable tips and hacks to help keep people safe.

Straight talking 

We prioritize the work it takes to cut through a complex set of ideas to get to the heart of the matter and present information in a way that adheres to our communication principles, the 3As: approachable, actionable, and accessible recommendations. Design and communication are at the core of what we do.

Locally created, universally relevant

While our team of volunteers came together to address a local need in the United States for clear messaging around COVID-19, the advice and content presented in COVID Straight Talk are universally applicable. We have prioritized reaching people in the United States because that is where we first identified the need, and it is the context our team best understands. As we expand our team of volunteers to people in other countries, those new team members will be best suited to localize the messaging and outreach to their regions. 

Our Collaborators

We believe in collaboration. COVID Straight Talk is the product of our partnerships with incredible experts and organizations. 

Given this effort’s interdisciplinary goals, we teamed up with a wide-ranging set of collaborators. We worked with community organizers, disaster response specialists, lawyers protecting low-wage workers, emergency room doctors, and building scientists.

We are extra grateful to our advisor Nathaniel Raymond who was the inspiration behind our team’s decision to focus on air safety. His work on past respiratory viruses enabled us to accelerate our execution with confidence. 

Our advisor Sabrina Brockman’s compassion and leadership inspired us to be as deliberate and accessible with our choice of language as possible when writing early drafts of our toolkits so that we made sure to meet readers where they are. Doing so ensures that our resources not only reach as many people as possible but are also as helpful as possible for their lived experiences.

We worked closely with our partner Forward Together to co-develop content and co-promote each other’s resources. We contributed the recommendations and guides on air safety to We Keep Each Other Safe, a guide produced by Forward Together written for Black, LatinX, and Indigenous communities working indoors and living in multi-occupancy homes during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Forward Together wrote the guide on Voting for COVID Straight Talk. We will also feature their guide of pregnancy feature their guide of pregnancy in the next site update. 

Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg advised us on all the content related to air safety. His explanations for the Air hacks enabled us to offer actionable recommendations for workers backed up by research on indoor air safety. His generosity is a model for how academic researchers can contribute their expertise to public knowledge. 

We received input on the Get M.A.D. Survey from several reviewers, including United 4 Respect, Professor Lydia Bourouiba at MIT and our advisor Professor Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg.

We created the Worker’s Legal Health and Safety Rights Guide with the guidance of The National Employment Law Project (NELP).  Their expertise on OSHA mandates helped us navigate dense legal documents. 

Given that all of Last Mile’s projects are volunteer-run, there is no way we could have launched this without the help of the many volunteers who stepped in. Whether it was for one day or several months, one phone call or 30 Zoom calls, we are grateful to all of the dedicated volunteers for their compassion and generosity.

PARTNERS

Our partners have generously donated a lot of time to bring COVID Straight Talk to life.

ADVISORS

Our advisors have generously offered their time to us to make COVID Straight Talk actionable and science-based.

Dr. Lupita Montoya


Member of the American Association for Aerosol Research, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science

Dr. Linsey Marr


Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Applied Interdisciplinary Research in Air, Virginia Tech

Dr. Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg


Professor at the University of Oregon, Director of the Institute for Health in the Built Environment

Kathryn Finney


Entrepreneur, Investor
White House Champion of Change

Jarrad Hampton-Marcell


Research Associate, University of Illinois Colorado

Dr. Shelly Miller


Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder

Dr. Jose-Luis Jimenez


Professor, University of Colorado Boulder

 

Patti Giglio


PR strategist, PSG Com

Dr. Amy Aminlari


Emergency Room Physician and Last Mile San Diego Founder and Lead

Kevin Slavin


Advisor, Phylagen.
Former Lead, Pandemic Task Force and VP Marketing, Crossover Health

 

Dr. Lydia Bourouibia


Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. The Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory | Bourouiba Group | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sean Griffin


CEO of Disaster Technologies Incorporated, ex-Director for Incident Management Integration Policy at the White House NCS under Obama and Trump

Dr. Delphine Farmer


Associate Professor, Department of Chemistry, Colorado State University

 

Dr. Brent Stephens


Professor and Department Chair, Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering, IIT

Dr. Smita Badhey


Emergency Room Physician in Bronx, NY

Dr. Marina Vance


Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder

Nathaniel Raymond


Lecturer in Global Affairs, Jackson Institute, Yale University

Dr. Sarp Aksel


OBGYN with Maternal Fetal Medicine Associates, NYC

Sarah Milstein


Engineering, Mailchimp

Dr. Davis Liu


Chief Clinical Officer of LemonAid Health

Harper Reed


Technologist

DJ Skelton


Kairos Alliance Group

Dr. Seema Bhangar


Indoor Air Institute

 

FUNDERS

funders.jpg

Community Networks

Our incredible community partners who are doing the groundwork of spreading the message of COVID Straight Talk. Join us as a community partner by sharing COVID Straight Talk.

  • Black Lives Matter Greater NY

  • Mutual Aid NYC

  • Return to the Heart Foundation, 50+ tribal nations & pueblos 

  • 504HealthNet, Louisiana

  • The Breastfeeding Center and the New Orleans Birthmark Collective

  • CORE Response, Louisiana

  • Local 100 United Labor Unions, Louisiana

  • Justice and Beyond Coalition, Louisiana

  • Local 100 United Labor Unions, Texas

  • Mutual Aid groups, Southern Solidarity, and The Community Fridge Initiative

  • Local 100 United Labor Unions, Arkansas

  • Vencerémos, Northwest Arkansas

  • Bvlbancha Collective, Mississippi

  • We2gether, Drew, Mississippi

  • WDSV and Delta Foundation of the CDC 

  • The Good Neighbor Project, Barrio Logan, San Diego

  • Casa Familiar, San Diego

  • San Ysidro Health Clinics, San Diego 

  • Encinitas4Equality (Encinitas Black Lives Matter), Encinitas

  • The Chicano Federation, San Diego

  • Community Resource Center, San Diego

  • Alpha Project (homeless shelters), San Diego

  • Mission San Luis Rey Parish Food Bank, San Diego

  • Father Joe’s Village Homeless Shelters, San Diego 

How We Created the Project

As a project of Last Mile, we followed its principles. We created a set of additional principles to guide content and design production: 

  1. Approachable—our material feels friendly, inviting, and not-intimidating

  2. Accessible—our material is accessible to those in greatest need

  3. Actionable—our material in actionable to those in greatest need 

  4. Affordable—our recommendations are affordable to those in greatest need

We self-organized into 4 internal teams to develop COVID Straight Talk.  

 
7.how we are organized.png
 
  1. The Content Team navigates the intersection of research on COVID-19, indoor building air quality, workers” rights, and employer responsibilities. We reached out to experts to help us translate scientific research and government issued guidance into actionable public health information for workers, employers, and HVAC professionals. We developed the M.A.D. (Masks, Air, and Distance) Guidelines to be memorable and scientifically rigorous, as well as easily understood and implementable. The Content Team also created the Science Task Force to stay on top of medical and scientific research. 

  2. The Data Team created a survey to share the content we created in a personalized way. They are working closely with labor organizers and our advisors in indoor air safety and healthcare to ensure that all data generated will be able to tell a story about the state of workplace safety. 

  3. The Communication and Design team works closely with our Content team to express and visualize the content and ideas in the most accessible and responsible way possible. 

  4. The Community Team ensures that COVID Straight Talk material is working with community-based organizations (CBOs) reaching those who have been impacted the most by COVID-19. While our general audience is anyone working indoors, our priority is to reach Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. Active Last Mile PPE local distribution groups in San Diego and New Orleans are able to quickly distribute COVID Straight Talk resources through local partnerships. We are looking to reach more CBOs such as unions, religious groups, local nonprofits, teachers, and small business organizations.

  5. The Spanish Translation Team synthesizes our extensive corpus of content on a highly technical and rapidly evolving body of knowledge into a single, coherent voice and in an accessible way. Their incisive questions and helpful insights on all areas of our work ended up pushing the entire project a higher standard of quality than we could’ve achieved otherwise.

Designing the Spanish Site

Great translations are a multi-stage process and require a team highly attuned to the nuances of language and current shifts in cultural expression. To ensure that the translated COVID Straight Talk site—Hablando claro del COVID—would help us achieve our primary goal of reaching the Latinx population in the U.S. and our secondary goal of reaching countries with the highest COVID-19 death rates (Mexico, Peru, Colombia), we created the Spanish version of COVID Straight Talk by taking a bottom-up and community approach to translation. 

Given that Spanish varies greatly across regions, we needed a way to ensure that the Spanish translation was neutral enough to speak to a wide range of Spanish speakers but also localized enough to resonate with our primary audience, Latinx of Mexican origin in the U.S. Over 62% of the Latinx population in the U.S. is of Mexican origin and 45% of the nation’s Latinx population lives along states bordering Mexico (California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico). At the same time, Latin America has one of the world’s highest death rates. At one point, it accounted for over 50% of deaths due to COVID-19. Therefore, we also wanted COVID Straight Talk to serve local volunteers and collaborators from countries with the highest death rates (Mexico, Peru, Colombia) and enable them to do local outreach using the site. 

To achieve this plan, we ensured that throughout the entire process we had people who were deeply involved and people who could jump in to consult, ensuring that the team had a balance of depth and perspective. The teams consisted of people who were attuned to popular culture and could translate material to be accessible. First, we created a Whatsapp group of 25 Spanish speakers from 10 different Spanish speaking countries, and various economic backgrounds and age groups. We relied on this group to review all of our documents for accessibility, help adjudicate options, and surface any possible issues. 

We then created a translation team led by Carmina Christen, an interpreter and translator with a wide-ranging background, based out of Peru. She collaborated with language consultant Ron Gonzales, who helped with Spanish linguistics. Carmina and Ron worked as a team to create the initial set of translations for the 20,000 words. Finally, we brought in Eugenio Fernández-Vázquez, an editor based out of Mexico who has extensive experience in copy editing, publishing, and editing. Eugenio pulled all the pieces together into a cohesive set of materials and also led the localization of news links and social media sources. He also guided Alex Guimaray, the designer who skillfully recrafted the design assets into Spanish. All of them leveraged the collective expertise of the Whatsapp group at all stages.

How to Help

COVID Straight Talk has been made  through volunteer efforts. We need additional support to get this resource out to the communities who need it the most. 

Here are some areas we need help in.  

Our primary goal now is to reaching critical mass with the  #COVIDStraighttalk Survey. This is how we will ensure our recommendations are reaching people and generate the data on how workers are being treated in the workplace.  

To reach this goal, here are the areas where we need the most help:

Spread the Word to People Who Work Indoors: Tell your friends and colleagues about our #COVIDStraighttalk Survey.  Here is our social media kit with templates for you to copy and paste to your instagram, twitter, facebook, text, and email.  

Community Partnerships: We want to partner with unions, school administrators, religious groups,, nonprofits, unions, and mutual aid groups that can spread the word about the site.  Go to this page about how to share out COVID Straight Talk.  

Donate Funding:  Connect us to philanthropic efforts that can release emergency funds. The urgency of work means we’re not able to work on traditional funding timelines. We will use funds to hire community organizers and pay for data related services. 

Contact us if you’re able to help.