Dr. Syra Madad, the senior director for the System Wide Special Pathogens Program for New York City Health and Hospitals, has been on the front line preparing for pandemics before the novel coronavirus hit. Now she's a leader in the response to COVID-19 in New York. You might recognize her from the documentary “Pandemic” on Netflix, not to be confused with Plandemic.

Religion Unplugged sat down on Zoom with Dr. Madad to talk about the role her Muslim faith and religion overall plays in her medical mission to fight the spread of diseases like the latest coronavirus. (This interview was recorded on May 19, before the death of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests.)

Meagan Clark: One thing I really appreciated watching “Pandemic” was that they showed a lot of different people in their faith, including you praying at home and attending mosque. And so I wanted to ask you, how does your personal faith inform your work and your drive to understand diseases?

Dr. Syra Madad: Well, you know, being a Muslim, one of the core tenants of being a Muslim is trying to help humanity in any way that we can. Each of us play our own special role in society. So whether you're a doctor or a nurse on the front line or you're a janitor or you're a cook, we all have our own kind of role and responsibility and we're contributing to the greater good of humanity. And so with that core tenet, you know, for me, I strongly believe in trying to help as many people as possible with the expertise that I may have. And so my drive has always been doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

And when we talk about highly infectious diseases, I view these highly infectious diseases as one of the greatest threats to mankind, because as you're seeing it play out right now with coronavirus 19, the pandemic, you know, the economic toll and the human toll and the societal toll alone is just unprecedented. It's huge. People are having a lot of issues, not just in terms of morbidity and mortality and the number of cases that we have. But if you're looking at the economic impact, the livelihood of people, you're looking at the psychological impact, there's so much more to these types of infectious diseases, so much more besides just the health implications that it's associated with.

So this is why for me, I've been in this field for a very long time, not only preparing for these types of events, but also responding to it. So I've had the privilege of responding to a number of different epidemics over the past few years. And just to name a few in the past five years that I've been involved in, this includes the Ebola outbreak in 2014 and 2016. This includes the Zika pandemic that we had across the world, the measles epidemic that we constantly have in New York City and just last year. You know, even seasonal flu, people think seasonal flu is not a big deal. Seasonal flu has a very high illness burden on not just the American people, but around the world. It's actually an epidemic in and of itself that we face every year. Thousands of people lose their lives. Thousands of people get infected with it and have poor outcomes. So I have the privilege of being able to be involved with responding to all of these different diseases emerging, reemerging. And then just routine infectious diseases that we often see.

My religion plays a very large role in terms of what I do, how I do it and what drives me. And I'm certainly very grateful to not just being a Muslim, but also being with a community of individuals. Whether you're Muslim or Christian or you do it regardless of your faith, we all have the same mission. And our mission is caring for the sickest of the sick. And this is why I also work at New York City Health and Hospitals, because I very much appreciate and I'm in tune with the mission. New York City Health and Hospitals is the largest municipal health care delivery system. And its mission, as it will says on the website is taking care of the sickest of the sickest, poorest of the poorest, regardless of their religion, their ability to pay or their racial profile. I really conform to that type of mission. 

MC: It's really impressive and inspiring work that you're doing. I know New York is just the hotbed right now and it also has some of the poorest zip codes in the country. And so one question I have is if it's unrealistic to keep the country on the lockdown until a vaccine is ready, and we do have a lot of essential workers still going to work. What moral imperatives should be guiding states as they're deciding right now when to reopen and what to reopen? I know that you focus on New York, but what about other states? What should they be considering when they're making these decisions?

SM: We're all in the same boat. And at the end of the day, the bottom line is it's trying to save as many lives as possible and not put people in harm's way. So in order for us to decrease the number of mortality and morbidity and just the general number of cases of people getting infected, the only way to do that is try to control it, to try to control the virus. In order for us to control the virus, in order for us to suppress it and try to contain it as much as possible, there are a series of different steps that we have to take.

I'm sure people are tired of hearing “testing.” But that is really when the cornerstones, which we don't know if you have the virus, we don't know to tell you to get isolated and to trace your contacts and to quarantine them. And we need to make sure we have that public health and health care infrastructure in place before we open up the economy.

No one is saying that we should be in a lockdown forever; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to shelter in place. So that way it's buying us time to be able to ramp up on these infrastructures that we need. So when we do open up, we can safely and effectively do so. And so with some of these states opening up right now, a lot of them meet the White House criteria. That's what has been laid out. A number of states that have been seeing a rise in cases, they don't have the infrastructure that they need in terms of the testing capacity and the contact tracing that's needed and even having additional resources that we call wrap-around services. 

So, for example, what we know is social distancing or physical distancing is a privilege. Not many people are able to do so. And why I see that is because we live in a society where people live in multi-generational homes in a two-bedroom apartment. You have 10 people living there, you know, so they don't have the privilege of keeping a physical distance from one another. If one person gets sick, coronavirus is a highly transmissible virus. So the likelihood of you infecting other people in your household living in that small corridor is very high. So we want to provide these wrap-around services to offer them. If you want to go stay in a hotel for the duration of your illness, then we have a hotel ready for you so you can go and check in and then stay there until you're no longer symptomatic, no longer have the virus and be able to infect other people. Because, again, the entire goal is trying to cut off that chain of transmission to be able to lessen, then, the number of cases that we see.

MC: How would you explain the coronavirus data, especially by the CDC, to skeptics? And there's a lot of skeptics in religious communities, especially outside New York City, where they're not getting that frontline experience on the street with people wearing masks maybe as much, and they're maybe just doing this as orders coming from states that have a problem when they don't see a problem in their community. And they're really skeptical of the way the CDC has changed numbers and the way that New York state has changed numbers. How do you explain how difficult the data collection is and why it should be trusted?

Data collection is a very complicated process and it requires a lot of different parts. It is not a one-size-fits-all type of approach because a surveillance system is different at local levels. But what we want to focus on and what the principle is, is going with science and going with data and going with medical expertise. 

One of the questions that I've gotten is, why should I follow the CDC? You know, people often ask and say, well, don't just follow people blindly. That's great. I certainly encourage people to do their own research to get the facts. But do you really think that a layperson that may not have any medical expertise can do a better job in searching through Google and going through the massive amount of information that is out there, instead of relying on the CDC that spends billions of dollars, trillions of dollars, has the medical expertise, has the years of experience and is putting together this information? Which one would you want to go with? Do you want to go with the many years of expertise and experience and showing that they've been successful?

So my recommendation is go with people that are credible. Go with sources that are credible, that have expertise. And CDC is a reliable, credible resource. And so I would follow what CDC is stating because they are looking at the data. They are looking at the facts. And when we talk about face masks and how we can protect ourselves, the biggest weapon we have against coronavirus disease right now is not a vaccine, because it doesn't exist.

Watch: How to determine if information is credible

Right now, the only weapon we have against coronavirus disease is our own behavior, the way we act, the way we behave and how responsible we are. So if we choose to go, if we choose to go out in public without a face mask and go out to a gathering of 100 people, well, now you want to expose yourself to the virus. The likelihood of exposing yourself to the virus is very, very high. And so if you can't behave by the recommendation that public health has asked you to, then you're putting yourself and other people in harm's way. So it's very important to go to credible sources.

The last thing that I'll mention is, you know, in my experience of responding to various epidemics, one of the things that we often rely on is not just the medical community, but also the religious leaders, because one of the biggest things an epidemic response needs is the trust of the people. And we understand a lot of people may not trust the government for various different reasons, whether it's in the United States or in another country. And they tend to go to sources that they think are trustworthy, like your priest or minister, like your imam. Because these are people that are part of their community, that they talk to day in and day out and they trust them.

Read: Tanzanian Churches Are A Hub For Prevention (And Potential Hotspot) For Coronavirus

So for us, it's very important for people like me in the field of public health to bring these religious leaders to the table, to make sure they're educated. They can provide the health education that we are trying to tell the public. So that way they can go back in their own community and preach and then tell them this is why you're wearing a face mask and this is why getting vaccinated is important. This is why staying home is important. We understand Ramadan. We understand that it was Easter. They understand people want to come together for religious reasons, but we want to make sure you're staying safe. This is why it's very important when we talk about religion. It plays a big role in epidemic response. Culture plays a very big role in epidemic response. So we need to make sure we bring these people, these key actors to the table to help in our stated mission of fighting and combatting the coronaviruses.

MC: Well, thank you so much for the work that you're doing, and all I can say is I hope that you don't burn out. We're inspired by what are you’re doing and I hope that you're able to care for yourself, too, during this time.

SM: I appreciate it. It's been a tough journey, but, you know, we're all here together.

Meagan Clark is the managing editor of Religion Unplugged. She previously reported retail and economic news for International Business Times, and human rights and religion stories from India for several outlets like Indian Express, the Wire and Scroll.in. Follow her on Twitter @MeaganKay.