Understanding the COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Lens of Population Health Science

In a few devastating short months in 2020, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic changed global mobility and interaction in ways that were unimaginable to much of the world’s population as recently as in 2019. More than 10 million people have, at this writing, been infected by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) globally, and more than 850,000 have died of COVID-19. As our science progresses, it is becoming possible to apply the principles of population health science to help us better understand the pandemic. What does a formal approach to population health science teach us about COVID-19? Building on our previously published work about the foundations of population health, we offer a few observations—a first draft of population health science thinking—as it intersects with the COVID-19 pandemic. Of note, our collective understanding of the pathology and causes of COVID-19 are rapidly changing by the day, and thus we fully expect that this work will evolve and improve as science progresses.