In March 2020, in conjunction with five other Bay Area counties, one of us issued the first shelter-in-place order in the country. As the county health officer of Santa Clara County, CA, home to roughly 1.9M residents, San Jose, and Silicon Valley, I (Cody) had the benefit of longstanding trust and collaboration with other Bay Area health officers. Collaboration, iteration, and rapid information sharing was critical at a time when public health infrastructure was strained to the max. What is less known is that through the crisis, the Public Health Department (PHD) and Emergency Operations Center (EOC) also developed partnerships with several groups at Stanford, including Stanford’s RegLab (directed by Ho) that shaped key aspects of COVID-19 response.
In this chapter, we describe some of the elements of the RegLab partnership and articulate what we have learned about academic-public health partnerships. We emphasize that the problems we faced were profound. Many lessons will be drawn from a once-in-a-generation crisis, spanning far beyond the scope of this chapter. Yet our collaboration has persuaded us that one important set of lessons is about getting academic-government collaborations right. How can health departments and researchers partner most effectively to tackle the most vexing problems, when the current ecosystem often impedes such collaborations?