'Dear Pandemic': Bucks Nurse, PhD Co-Founded A COVID Advice Blog

BUCKS COUNTY, PA — Ashley Ritter of Yardley — a geriatric nurse practitioner, University of Pennsylvania postdoctoral fellow, and mother of three — co-founded the coronavirus advice blog Dear Pandemic (modeled on Dear Abby) more than a year ago.

Since then, this digital information source has amassed a following in the tens of thousands and been written about in publications like National Geographic and Time Magazine. On July 1, Ritter became its CEO.

It all began for her in lockdown, at the beginning of the pandemic. She wasn’t happy with the health and safety misinformation she saw being shared on Facebook.

“I was in my basement trying to figure out what I could do to be helpful,” she laughed.

That’s when she connected with a colleague, Alison Buttenheim, who’d been distributing useful information and insights on Twitter. Buttenheim’s friend, the epidemiologist Malia Jones, had just shared a letter of her recommendations that went viral on Facebook.

Buttenheim and Jones had been considering establishing a larger advice sharing platform. Ritter suggested launching the column on Facebook, and Dear Pandemic was born.

In the time since, Ritter and her colleagues — all women with PhDs, volunteering their time — have answered thousands of burning questions on their platform. These include: Can a common asthma treatment also treat COVID-19? Did the World Health Organization say that kids should NOT get the vaccine? Any advice on pandemic dating?

As a team of epidemiologists, health professionals, data scientists, and more, Those Nerdy Girls (as they’ve dubbed themselves) had the scientific expertise down. But it wasn’t only about that.

“I think one of the things we had going for us very early on is that we weren’t just saying ‘wash your hands,’” Ritter said. “We were saying, ‘This is really hard mentally. How do I deal with this?’”

For Ritter, who until recently served as the blog’s Chief Clinical Officer, this type of crisis response fell in line with the skills she’s been building throughout her career.

“It felt like a natural transition at that moment to do something that was spreading information that would help thousands of people to make decisions that could protect their health — that felt very in line with nursing,” she reflected. “I wasn’t doing it at a bedside. I was giving the best information we had available at the time to the masses.”

Ritter has been vocal about the disproportionate burden of care in our society, and about how the direct care workforce — composed primarily of women and people of color — is treated as an expendable resource.

Speaking to the significance of personal identity for the women helming Dear Pandemic, she cited multiple studies showing that women are more likely to do care work in the home, more likely to make health decisions for the home, and less likely to be consulted or credited for their expertise.

“The Dear Pandemic team has 20+ children among the women on the team,” she said. “We were working full time jobs. We were educating our children from home for most of the last year. And we were working in a volunteer capacity. And we did that because women are the people who make decisions for the health of their families.”

Ritter didn't just give advice; she learned more about her own field during the pandemic. Given that she works with vulnerable populations — like older adults and houseless people — she wants to make sure that Dear Pandemic consistently responds to an array of needs and circumstances.

“What has really hit me is that when we make recommendations and guidelines, we must be inclusive of populations that don’t have the privilege to follow social distancing, may not have access to the information to do the things we’re recommending, and may have zero resources to actually follow through,” she said. “Those are the populations that get left behind. … It has hyper-focused me on being sure that as a site we’re inclusive of everyone and the resources that they have.”

As a Bucks County resident raised in Levittown, Ritter is familiar on a personal level with the pandemic’s local impact. And after Pennsylvania recently lifted its mask mandate at around 60 percent vaccination, she does have some advice.

“The Delta variant is here, and it spreads much more quickly than previous variants,” she said. “And children under the age of 12 specifically are not vaccinated. They are capable of getting COVID and they are capable of spreading COVID. … If you can get vaccinated, it’s really important. There are populations such as children under 12 who cannot, who will continue to be at risk specifically for these variants. That would be my main message.”

She paused, then added: “And the other is that masks are OK!”

For Ritter, these health decisions aren’t just about protecting oneself from illness. They’re about protecting others — and they’re also about avoiding the stress and inconvenience of COVID exposure, that pulls us out of our lives and routines.

“COVID’s disruptive,” she said. “Nobody wants this. Masking and distancing preserve most of daily life.”

In this next phase, as vaccination levels rise and positivity rates decrease, Ritter feels that Dear Pandemic is in a moment of transition. Now, she says, the blog will focus more around “infodemiology,” a field that aims to “characteriz[e] and effectively curat[e] the firehose of accurate and inaccurate information that circulates during an epidemic.” The tenets of infodemiology help people break down medical headlines, and understand what sources they can trust in their day-to-day lives.

The blog will also focus more on its Spanish-language offshoot, Querida Pandemia.

“What we’ve heard from followers of Querida Pandemia is that healthcare professionals are not able to get quality information in Spanish to distribute to their patients and to their communities,” she said. “That’s a resource we are going to invest in moving forward. COVID may be old news to some in the United States, but the rest of the world is really facing a crisis without the vaccine coverage that we have the privilege of in the U.S.”

Ritter believes that information, and conversation, is empowering and necessary. That’s her most critical advice.

“Unless we have these conversations and it becomes OK to ask questions about things we don’t know on pretty much any topic, we’re not going to find the middle,” she said. “And the middle is where the sweetness of life comes from.”

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