Why this Harvard doctor is optimistic about US overcoming COVID-19 despite 'epid

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Dr. Paul Farmer’s friends accuse him of being “pathologically optimistic.” That may explain how he’s managed to spend his life helping people in some of the most traumatized parts of the world: Haiti before and after the 2010 earthquake; Rwanda after the genocide there; West Africa during the Ebola outbreak of 2014-2015; and now the United States during COVID-19.

He's sorely disappointed in how his home country has handled the pandemic. "There's a lot to be done," he said. But he remains confident that the pandemic can "be brought to heel."

Farmer chairs the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founded Partners In Health, a Boston nonprofit that provides medical care in developing countries and the U.S. His work is the subject of a recent Netflix documentary, "Bending the Arc."

Farmer’s latest book, “Fever, Feuds and Diamonds,” published this month, focuses on the Ebola outbreak and the public health mistakes that made it worse.

He tells harrowing stories about people in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea who lost parents, children or spouses – sometimes all three. He argues the outbreak could have been less lethal if the French, British and American colonial powers had left the region with a medical infrastructure, and if international efforts had focused on helping Ebola patients get better, rather than containing the disease’s spread.

With COVID-19 raging across the country and the world, Farmer talked with USA TODAY about what the lessons of West Africa, Haiti and Rwanda can teach us about our own struggle.