Let me tell you a secret. I had been worried about this particular blog post for the past month. As a rational and reflective member of the public health community, I had predicted that where I am right now would not be too different to where I was at this time last month. And I was right. The pandemic is far from over. And as a little foot soldier in the COVID-19 bunker, my own life has followed a similar pattern day after day. I might as well just copy and paste last month’s blog post here and just give everyone an overwhelming experience of déjà vu.

As expected, Naomi and Charles have been working hard on COVID-19, too. It’s a pandemic, after all. As a public health professional, I’ve decided that the new definition of a pandemic should involve all of your colleagues’ email inboxes being set to autoresponder messages. Our team has managed to catch up online sporadically over the past months, though. Each time, I’ve been struck by how much we’ve grown as people over this time. The latest events certainly give young practitioners like us an endless stream of learning opportunities. Sometimes I feel slightly guilty that I might be personally profiting, in terms of professional development, from something so disastrous.

I know that this blog is meant to be about the Talk Public Health project, rather than for personal reflections. But in our next episode, you might find a great deal of overlap between the two. Yes, I can confirm that it has been recorded. But no, I don’t know when it will be released. Unfortunately in this era of overwhelming uncertainty, we’re no longer as certain about release dates. What we do know, though, is that we are greatly missing our opportunities to have regular conversations with you, our audience. We are hankering for a chance to sit down for a nice, friendly, public health chat. We want to tell you about what we’ve learned in this COVID-19 response, and how we’ve grown and learned as people. But we also want to know about what you’ve been doing during this time, too, and how this has changed and shaped what you do. At least, for the latter, we still have all of our social media accounts. So please get in touch with us. Tell us that you’re doing OK. That will be enough to put a smile on our faces for hours.