[00:00:03] Welcome to Humans in Public Health. I'm Megan Hall.

[00:00:07] In the past few years, the field of public health has become more visible than ever before, but it's always played a crucial role in our daily lives. Each month, we talk to people who make this work possible. Today, we're taking a look back, into the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

[00:00:30] If you ask anyone, they remember the exact moment that they realized that COVID was going to change the world. For most of us, that moment came during the second week of March 2020. Schools were shut down. Many jobs became remote.

[00:00:46] But by the time most of our lives were changed by COVID-19, public health experts had already spent weeks or even months trying to stop the spread of COVID. So on this episode of Humans in Public Health, to commemorate 5 years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, we're taking you into the lives of public health experts at the very beginning - before most of us even knew we were in a pandemic.

[00:01:12] In the next half hour you'll hear from five public health experts, from an ER doctor, to someone you've definitely seen on TV. They'll bring us back to the moments that they knew our world was about to change.

[00:01:28] To start, let's go back to 2019. Our first story comes from someone who has spent her entire career researching pandemics and preparing for the moment they arrive.

[00:01:38] Jennifer Nuzzo: My name is Jennifer Nuzzo, and I'm the founding director of the Pandemic Center at Brown.

[00:01:43] I was on vacation with my family when I realized that COVID was something that we were going to have to pay attention to.

[00:01:50] It was winter break. It was actually New Year's Eve. I was with my family in Florida. I remember. It was a New Year's celebration on the beach. My kids were really thrilled running around, you know, picking up the balloons and like inflatable balls and things. And there were lights. And I remember thinking, this is nice

[00:02:14] And I was walking on the beach with my family when I got a message from my team telling me about this unusual outbreak that was happening in China.

[00:02:24] Well, at the time, I was running a project where we would regularly look at what was happening in the world, and the team saw this outbreak and wondered if it was something that we should write up for the weekly blog that we did. And we didn't know a lot, but there were enough reasons to kind of want to know more.

[00:02:46] I remember turning to my husband saying, yeah, there's this situation going on in China that doesn't sound very good. And he's used to hearing me talk about these things randomly, and I think he just kind of tuned it out and turned his attention to the beach, but later realized what I was talking about.

[00:03:07] Megan Hall: A few days later, on the other side of Florida, Scott Rivkees got an email.

[00:03:13] Scott Rivkees: I would say it was right after New Year's 2020

[00:03:16] Megan Hall: Today Scott is a professor and associate dean at Brown University, But during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he was in a different role -- leading Florida's health system...

[00:03:27] Scott Rivkees: And in 2020, I was the State Surgeon General and Secretary of Health for Florida.

[00:03:34] I was sitting at my desk. It was fairly quiet because it was after, uh, the holiday, it was at the Department of Health Building in Tallahassee, and I think it was one of the few people there. And across, uh, my desk email came this cryptic email saying that, uh, we are advising you that there are 44 cases of a pneumonia that was quite severe. This is a situation that we are monitoring very closely.

[00:04:03] So I had been in my role for about four months then, and I'd interacted with CDC before, had gotten alerts before, but never something like this.

[00:04:12] So I sort of said, If they're sending out something like this, you knew it was something serious

[00:04:22] Megan Hall: A few weeks after Scott got that email, an ER doctor and infectious disease expert heard his phone ring.

[00:04:29] Craig Spencer: My name is Craig Spencer, and in 2020, I was working as an emergency physician and public health professor in New York City.

[00:04:36] Megan Hall: Craig has worked all over the globe fighting infectious disease outbreaks -- You might have heard of him, because in 2014 he survived an infection of Ebola, after caring for patients in West Africa.

[00:04:49] Craig Spencer: A friend of mine called from Beijing, someone that we've known for a really long time, who was living there with his family, and he was asking me these questions about, you know, lockdown and disease and what is going to happen, and was really, really really unsettled and kind of riled all at the same time.

[00:05:10] Megan Hall: In Beijing at the time, the streets were empty, people stayed in their homes, hoping to stop the spread of the virus.

[00:05:16] Craig Spencer: So I think I walked around my bedroom for 30 to 45 minutes learning from him about what he was going through and trying to provide some type of advice for what may come next? And it was just clear to me at that point that it was going to cause a lot of public health catastrophe, but also social catastrophe, because I was hearing it in the voice of a friend.

[00:05:40] I knew that if this was going to be a problem, it was going to be a problem exactly where I was at at that moment, in New York City. Right? There's no outbreak or problem that has a global footprint that does not show up in New York City. And probably within a week after that was when you had my wife being the person at Trader Joe's on the Upper West Side with two carts full of just like food and all of the things that we're probably going to need.

[00:06:08] Megan Hall: Our next memory comes from a voice you've probably heard before -- Ashish Jha. Today Ashish is the Dean of Brown's School of Public Health, but during the pandemic he was a fixture on the news. He made thousands of TV appearances, and people turned to him for trusted information about how to stay safe.

[00:06:27] Ashish Jha: I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in January, of 2020. when I realized. This was going to be a global pandemic. This was going to be a virus that was going to spread throughout the whole world.

[00:06:39] Megan Hall: Ashish was sitting in his office, at the Harvard Global Health Institute, where he was the director at the time.

[00:06:45] Ashish Jha: The first cases had popped up in both Seattle and in South Korea at the same time. And you just had a sense that, okay, like those are very different places. This is going to spread and it's going to spread everywhere in the world. And the real question at that time was, was this going to be Was this going to be transformative and going to kill millions of people, or was this going to be, you know, a problem for some but not others?

[00:07:06] I remember thinking, I should write something about this. Well, I wrote a piece saying it's going to be a problem for much of the world, but America will do just fine.

[00:07:15] Megan Hall: You said America was going to be fine. When did you realize America was not going to be fine?

[00:07:21] Ashish Jha: Well, that I remember very clearly. So, February 26th, I was in Switzerland. I was visiting a clinic and I got a phone call from a reporter from ProPublica. He actually gave me the download on how we still didn't have a functioning test, tests were not widely available and therefore we did not know how far and wide the virus had spread. That was the moment I realized America's kind of screwed.

[00:07:52] Megan Hall: At this point, pandemic expert Jennifer Nuzzo had already tried to warn the U.S. government that they needed to take action. That same month, she was asked to testify in front of Congress…

[Audio from Congressional Hearing]:

[00:08:06] We meet today for Congress's first hearing on the 2019 novel coronavirus. This is the first hearing on coronavirus and many Americans as well as members of congress, this is on our mind right now.

[00:08:19] Jennifer Nuzzo: Good afternoon…

[00:08:22] Jennifer Nuzzo: So I was testifying in early February and I just remember sitting in the hearing and so all of the questions we got in that hearing were political in nature. They were like, well, what do you think about China? And, you know, I mean, it was like, but don't you think these bans are going to work?

[00:08:38] It was like all political. And I remember feeling incredibly frustrated that we were in a pandemic even if nobody was calling in at that point. And there was so much for us to do. We had to get nursing homes ready. We had to think about protecting prisons. There were just so many different things that we had to do. And nobody was doing it.

[00:08:55] And I remember at one moment kind of turning and looking at my husband who was sitting Behind me in sort of the front row. My husband's a scientist and I remember just seeing his like very tortured face Trying to follow the conversation because to his scientific mind like none of it made sense at all and he was just like what are they talking about? So, it just felt very surreal.

[00:09:20] Here was what I thought was a very kind of doable list of actions that we needed to take. Not all of it was easy, but there were a lot of things that I thought, you know, we could easily do. And we were just wasting time. And that felt very frustrating.

[00:09:38] Megan Hall: Back in Florida, Surgeon General Scott Rivkees was watching this play out on the TV. He remembers sitting in the state's emergency operations center -- an elaborate headquarters the state uses to respond to hurricanes...

[00:09:50] Scott Rivkees: If you see hurricanes coming to Florida, you'll see the governor being interviewed, and this is in the background. Big TV screens up on the ceilings, curved desks, where we bring together all different agencies. And off behind that, there's a smaller room where the leadership sits. And this is where myself would be, Jared Moskowitz, who was Director of Emergency Management. He's now a congressman. We're there.

[00:10:14] And we had a TV in that room. And we're looking at the news and seeing people being welded into their homes in Wuhan, China. And then, uh, they had shots of an emergency field hospital, 1,000 beds, 2,000 beds being constructed in a two week period of time. And when this came on, remember, Jared and I looking at each other and saying, “My gosh, this is going to be incredibly serious.”

[00:10:45] Megan Hall: And pretty soon, cases started arriving across the country. Our next memory comes from one of the top doctors in the state of Rhode Island.

[00:10:53] Philip Chan: My name is Dr. Philip Chan. I'm a physician here at Brown University, serve as associate professor, also serve as a medical consultant for the Rhode Island Department of Health.

[00:11:03] Megan Hall: It was leap day, February 29th 2020, when Philip got a call.

[00:11:08] Philip Chan: It was actually on a Saturday, and I remember it very vividly. I was visiting my parents in New Hampshire. It was cold out in New Hampshire, snow on the ground, and I remember just eating a big dinner and just uh, lounging in the chair that my mom keeps by her fireplace and the fireplace was on.

[00:11:27] In public health, you tend to always have your phone close to you. And I got the call from the health department. And I remember very vividly that my colleague at the health department said, “What are you doing? Where are you?” And I knew right then that we had our first case of COVID-19.

[00:11:44] Megan Hall: The first person to test positive for COVID in Rhode Island had been on a high school class trip to Italy.

[00:11:50] Philip Chan: This was a first patient admitted to one of the local hospitals with pneumonia. At that time, we were only very selectively testing people, so in retrospect, we believe that the COVID, was much underestimated, even at that point in time. And the patient was sick in the ICU of one of our Rhode Island hospitals.

[00:12:05] Megan Hall: So Philip hung up the phone, told his parents what had happened, and raced back home to Rhode Island.

[00:12:12] Philip Chan: You know, in retrospect, it was one of the last times I'd traveled up to New Hampshire, you know, during 2020 to visit my parents because of the whole shutdown. We had all hands on deck meeting the next morning, Sunday morning at 8 AM to start what was going to be a very long journey through the COVID pandemic.

[00:12:28] Megan Hall: The very next day, just up route 95 in Boston, Ashish Jha realized what was about to happen too.

[00:12:35] Ashish Jha: I think it was Monday morning. I was running the Harvard Global Health Institute at the time. There were about 35 staff working on a variety of different topics. Called an all staff meeting and I said to everybody, whatever you all were working on on Friday, starting today, everybody's working on this virus. And pretty much everybody was shocked, and several of my team members were like, Really? Like, it seems like a little bit of an overreaction. And I said, I don't think it's an overreaction. I think we have got to stop everything else we're doing and focus on this.

[00:13:04] And then people were like, well, we have this conference on climate and health. I'm like, cancel that conference. And the initial reaction, I think, of everybody was you're way overreacting, and they all wondered, like, I had just been in Europe. Had I been smoking something? Had something gone wrong? Was I well?

[00:13:21] Well I think about a week or ten days later, we started seeing a lot of other things change. The NBA shut down, and once the NBA shut down, I think at that point everybody realized, like, the world had changed. So that was pretty rapid.

[00:13:30] Megan Hall: This gets us to the point you probably remember as the start of the pandemic. Schools shut down and it felt like everything changed overnight. As Jennifer Nuzzo, the pandemic expert remembers, at first, everyone thought this would just be a two week pause.

[00:13:46] Jennifer Nuzzo: and I remember getting a text from a mom friend who wrote to me and said, “Oh my gosh, two weeks. What are we going to do? How are we going to survive two weeks? No school.” And I remember seeing that text, and I wrote her back, and I said, It's not going to be two weeks. It's going to be much longer.

[00:14:08] Megan Hall: Jennifer has spent her whole career studying pandemics and how to respond to them.

[00:14:13] Jennifer Nuzzo: I mean I had friends reach out, you know, friends who don't know me professionally, they've known me personally, and they'd send me texts like, oh, this is what you've been waiting for, isn't it? And I remember thinking to myself, I really wish I was not relevant in this moment, because there is literally no escaping it. I think about all those people that had, during the pandemic, you know, started making sourdough, or banana bread, or whatever the trends were, and I was thinking, like, it would've been nice to have a little bit of a break and have a pandemic-related hobby. My husband joked that I just like wake up at three in the morning and write op-eds as like as my hobby. But mostly it was just out of, you know, trying to figure out how we can get ourselves out of the situation.

[00:14:52] Megan Hall: And the situation was bad. Craig Spencer, the ER doctor in New York, saw the havoc of COVID up close every day.

[00:15:01] Craig Spencer: I remember at some point in March where it went from, in the span of just a few days, trying to find the one person with COVID in the ER to trying to find anyone without COVID. I mean, it was almost overnight that it just inundated the emergency room. And I remember towards the end of March, maybe the first few days of April, walking into kind of more of our community hospital at the northern end of Manhattan. Not very big. A few dozen beds.

[00:15:29] And I remember going into the hospital through the ambulance entrance and walking across what felt like a threshold into the apocalypse. Walking through a double set of doors and just hearing nothing but beeping. It felt like the machines had taken over because those people who were sick that first week, who were deathly ill that second week, were now all on ventilators, were all on life support.

[00:16:08] So I remember walking into this space, seeing nothing but like a sea of lifeless bodies, hearing nothing but just like the continuous chirping of machines and drips and medications, knowing that we weren't going to have enough people to take care of patients that day, knowing that more people would almost certainly die that day than any of the days that I worked in West Africa during the Ebola outbreak. And I remember thinking, no matter how hard I or anyone tries to explain what this looks and feels like, there's just like no way that people are gonna, are ever gonna be able to envision what this moment is and what it means.

[00:16:58] Megan Hall: Craig would pause for a minute, to take in what he was seeing.

[00:17:02] Craig Spencer: Maybe not even a minute. Maybe ten seconds. And then do the same thing that I did every other day. Make sure my mask is nice and tight. And walk in, and start seeing people.

[00:17:19] Megan Hall: Many hours later, Craig's shift would end. He would wash his hands, disinfect his phone, and walk home.

[00:17:26] Craig Spencer: And then I would take off my clothes at the door, either outside the door, or right when I stepped in, put it all into a bag, and wash that and then go directly to the shower. And there were a couple of times where my daughter who was just, you know, walking at that point would see me come home and would run to me and, you know, my wife would have to you know, maybe give her a little baby hip check to say, you know, no, no, hold on, hold on, daddy will come to you in a bit. That happened quite a few times. So yeah, the goal was come home, try to decontaminate personally, but also just kind of mentally, 'cause you don't wanna bring either a virus or really that, that sadness, into your, into your household.

[00:18:04] Megan Hall: What did you do about the sadness, not bringing it into your household?

[00:18:09] Craig Spencer: Hmm. You know, it was going to come in regardless, but I had worked in places before that were really tough where I'd seen these things and I was maybe a little bit better at compartmentalizing. But I also– the one thing that we had that nobody else had at the beginning of the pandemic was that we did have camaraderie. I got to see my friends like every day when I went to work. It wasn't always a fun time but I got to see them. Right. And so I had. Interactions when we were talking about patients or even in between patients where we would, in a sense talk about normal stuff, and try to have some sense of normalcy. And a lot of times people would reach out to me to ask that same question. For people that hadn't been in a scenario where they were seeing many of their patients die every single day.

[00:18:57] It's not something that we do in emergency medicine. People don't realize this but like very rarely do our patients die. We've become very, very good at keeping people alive. And I can go like a month, two months without seeing people die as an emergency physician. It was impossible to go, some days, it felt like an hour or two without having a patient die. And so for my friends who were battle-hardened emergency physicians for a decade or more in some of the toughest places in New York City, this just really jolted them. What do you do when one of your, nurses that you've worked with for a really long time comes out of retirement to try and bolster the nursing staff that’s getting sick and ultimately ends up dying themselves?

[00:19:41] These were just like– the patient care aspect of it, like what it felt like for patients is completely unimaginable for so many of us. What it felt like inside hospitals is so unimaginable for people that weren't there. But what it felt like for providers themselves, is similarly really impossible to convey and to share, like, what it was like going into work.

[00:20:08] Megan Hall: While Craig was experiencing the chaos of the ER in New York, back in Boston, Ashish Jha was experiencing a different kind of chaos -- constant interview requests.

[00:20:19] Ashish Jha: The floodgates opened. I started doing a lot of media. There were days I was getting like 200 media calls a day, and doing like 40 plus media hits a day, between TV, newspapers, magazines, etc. And that went on for weeks, and I remember thinking, like, this is going to stop. And the reason it's going to stop is that my mental model was that any day now, you're going to start getting daily briefings from the CDC, and they're going to lecture all the data and the insights, and then what will happen is I'll start getting occasional phone calls where somebody will be like, hey, the CDC said this, do you agree or disagree?Those CDC daily briefings never came. Instead, And, and the media stuff continued...

[00:20:57] (Montage of TV anchors introducing Ashish Jha)

Anchor 1: Breaking news Donald Trump Jr, testing positive for coronavirus. Up front now, Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean at Brown University School of Public Health. Doctor Jha, good to see you.

Anchor 1: For more, let’s bring in our friend Dr. Ashish Jha

Anchor 2: I want to bring in Dr. Ashish Jha

Anchor 3: We’re now joined by Dr. Ashish Jha,

Anchor 4: Doctor Jha, thank you, good to see you.

Anchor 5: Joining us now to break down these new developments, Dr. Ashish Jha…

[00:21:19] Ashish Jha: I was working like 18, 20 hours a day, seven days a week. That was a lot. That's fine. I'm not whining. And then eventually by May, I put in– I know this all sounds crazy now– but I put in this new rule that said I don't do media on Saturdays. And that was my day of like seeing my family. And also, reading and catching up on things.

[00:21:39] Megan Hall: This might not be obvious, but doing all of these TV appearances was pretty disorienting. When he was on TV, Ashish actually left his house, and went to his office building in Harvard Square.

[00:21:51] Ashish Jha: It was very surreal to drive into Harvard Square. There's no one on the streets.

[00:21:55] ]Megan Hall: Ashish would go upstairs to his office, where he’d set up a makeshift TV studio. When he was there, he was the only person in the building. And then the media calls would begin.

[00:22:04] Ashish Jha: You know, when I was doing media, especially when I was doing TV, it was a very odd experience, like, when I think about a CNN hit– It's four minutes long. I would stare at a blank screen. I would hear the anchor's voice in my ear, and I would just speak to a blank screen for four minutes, and then the hit would be over. And then I go back to doing whatever else I was doing. And so you never had a sense that anybody else was like watching any of this. And because we weren't out there socializing, it wasn't like I'd go out for drinks on a Friday night and people would say, “Hey, I saw you on CNN.” There was none of that.

[00:22:37] Ashish Jha: I think it was sometime in May of that year that I first realized, Oh, people are actually watching this and paying attention. I remember being away on a weekend with my family. Actually, we were out at the Cape. And I was standing in line for ice cream and a bunch of people started walking up to me and chatting with me and saying, and I was like, how do you know who I am? And they're like, because you're on TV all the time. I'm like, I guess, but, but I had never gotten that feedback. And, you know, at the very beginning it was kind of charming, and then it got annoying, and then my kids really got annoyed by it, and then every time we'd go out to dinner they were like, oh god, that person's staring at us.

[00:23:08] Megan Hall: Ashish says that these days, he doesn't get recognized as often, and he likes it that way. But, he's realized that being a trusted voice is an important part of his job.

[00:23:17] Ashish Jha: I remember at some point into April, I just thought, why am I doing this? Like, why am I doing so much media, and I should really stop. And I was talking to a friend of mine, And he said, actually, this is useful and it's public health. Like, public health begins with the public and in a moment where the public doesn't know what to believe and what's going on, having somebody they trust tell them how they think about the problem. I mean, I wasn't like out there saying, here's what's going to happen. I didn't know. But I could walk them through what I was seeing, what I was thinking, how I was interpreting things, how I was behaving, what I was recommending to my family and friends. And I realized people found that useful. And I thought, okay, that's part of my job then.

[00:23:56] Megan Hall: But Ashish says public health professionals made plenty of mistakes. while they tried to give trustworthy information.

[00:24:02] Ashish Jha: One of the slogans that I actually always disliked, was this idea of “trust the science” or “follow the science.” And that was actually the wrong way to communicate to the American people. It wasn't about trusting the science, it was about follow the scientific process. And let me explain. The idea became that there are right answers that science gives us. But in a dynamic pandemic where the virus is changing, our knowledge of the virus is changing, there is no one right answer that's going to be true the whole time. And what we needed to do, better than we did, and I'm guilty of this, I try to do it, but could have done it better undoubtedly, is explain the scientific process to people. That this is the best that we know right now, but we will change our minds as we learn more things. Any answer you give that’s simple and clean today is going to be wrong six months from now.

[00:24:53] I mean, I still find it really remarkable, there are people who will go back and find a tweet of mine from November of 2020 and say, “What happened to this guy?” I'm like, I'll tell you what happened to that guy. He got vaccinated, as did the rest of the country. Like, you don't want my advice from November 2020 to make sense in March of 2025. That's crazy. And the inability to shift, because we had said the science says X, really I think boxed public health into a lot of bad decisions that they could not unwind themselves of. And I think that we all would have done better if we had explained. What the scientific process is, how it's self updating, how it's self correcting. How you get stuff wrong and that's okay because you get better over time.

[00:25:36] Megan Hall: Craig Spencer, the ER Doctor and infectious disease specialist, agrees that public health needs to change after the pandemic, but he says the problem is bigger than that.

[00:25:47] Craig Spencer: I think there's massive amounts of learning for even the field of public health, right? We've beat these to a pulp in the past couple years. We need to be honest, and we need to involve communities more, and we need to think about our messaging. And I think that those things are true. I also think that we conflate the problems with public health with larger societal problems. An example is if you look at what's happened in trust overall, not just in public health, not in medicine. If you look at trust overall, in Supreme Court, in the presidency, in any of our political institutions, in any of the things that we've long considered true and dear, they have plummeted over the past 50 years, just like from highs to incredible lows.

[00:26:29] So I think public health is not an outlier in that. And I'm worried that so much of the finger pointing goes at public health to say you need to do better. When it turns out we all need to do better, we need to have really difficult conversations with people we don't agree with and figure out actually the places that we do agree and move forward on that. The polarization in every single aspect of our life is going to make it harder for us, not just to move forward politically, but as a field in public health. And until we do that, I think we are all worse off.

[00:27:01] Megan Hall: Jennifer Nuzzo, the pandemic expert, says despite all of these mistakes and disappointments, she still saw moments of hope.

[00:27:08] Jennifer Nuzzo: I really was heartened by how many people just kind of rolled up their sleeves and decided to pitch in and help. Particularly academics. You know, I saw people who hadn't necessarily focused on pandemic preparedness for their careers, but they were epidemiologists. They were behavioral scientists, data scientists, they just kind of rolled up their sleeves and said, What can I do to help? People were stepping into roles that they had never occupied before just because they are like, you know what, there's a crisis. I'm going to use my skills to try to figure out how to help as much as possible. And I think it really speaks to what's best about America, that we have this, like, remarkable scientific capacity, this remarkable sense of, you know, democracy breeds optimism, breeds ingenuity. You know when pressed and when stressed, people do really step up and try to help.

[00:28:04] So as much as I think we look back five years ago on COVID, I mean, with a lot of grief and trauma and reflecting on the fact that we lost more than more than 1.6 million American lives. I think it's also important to look back and kind of remind ourselves of our resilience and the ingenuity that we saw happen. And so I think that's what I choose to focus on. This is not the first pandemic. We will continue to see these sorts of events happen. But it is my hope that we can channel that innovative spirit and sort of use that as our kind of North Star for thinking about how we can live in a world where these events will happen more and more likely, but live in a way that we don't allow them to just upend our lives, that we can be resilient in the face of them.

[00:28:54] Megan Hall: You've been listening to a special episode of Humans in Public Health commemorating 5 years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We heard memories from:

Jennifer Nuzzo, a Professor of Epidemiology and the Director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Ashish Jha, the Dean of Brown’s School of Public Health.

Philip Chan, an Associate Professor of medicine at Brown University. And a professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Scott Rivkees, the Associate Dean for Education at the Brown University School of Public Health and a Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice.

and Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician and an Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health.

Humans in Public Health is a monthly podcast brought to you by Brown University School of Public Health. This episode was produced by Nat Hardy and recorded at the podcast studio at CIC Providence.

I'm Megan Hall. Talk to you next month!