Max Henderson: CovidActNow, a Necessary Counterweight

Remember how fast shelter-in-place went from seeming impossible to becoming a reality? Remember how policy makers all of a sudden appeared to understand what was at stake and take action? How did this happen?

Max Henderson was on a sabbatical from his full time role at Google, when he saw the first few COVID cases in the US. At that moment, he realized that we were not acting quickly enough. This led Max to found CovidActNow.org, which started out as a simple calculator to understand how many deaths could result from every day of delay. Pairing this with a large public pressure campaign, Max helped push government leaders to respond to this crisis. I spoke with Max to talk about the early days of CovidActNow, how he came up with his model and what he is focusing on going forward.