CDC museum collects COVID-19 news, artifacts for future use

Like most museums across America, the David J. Sencer CDC Museum at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta is closed to the public due to COVID-19 restrictions. Its staff, however, is busier than ever.

Louise E. Shaw has been the curator at the CDC Museum since 2002. Her team was finishing up “Influenza: Complex Virus/Complex History,” an exhibition slated to open May 26, when the coronavirus struck. The timing was coincidental—the museum has been designing the show, which traces the global impact of influenza since the 1918 pandemic, for more than two years. But the similarities are still eerie. Shaw was already planning to include an original film poster of 2011 thriller Contagion—which had scenes shot at the CDC headquarters—in the “Influenza” exhibition when the movie saw a COVID-related spike in streaming last month.

The urgent need to document what’s happening right now reminds Shaw of another CDC exhibition she curated: “Ebola: People + Public Health + Political Will,” about the 2014-2016 epidemic in West Africa.

“When we started collecting Ebola-related materials, we knew what a huge story it was,” said Shaw, noting how nearly 4,000 CDC workers were involved with the response. “COVID-19 eclipses that.”

Shaw and her team are now tasked with amassing artifacts, documents, first-person testimonials, and imagery from photojournalists and deployed CDC staffers—a delicate balance when so many frontline workers are still in the throes of the crisis. Gathering preliminary accounts from field workers—such as what officials in San Diego were seeing when cruise ship passengers finally docked at designated quarantine sites—is important to telling a more accurate and detailed story later.

“A lot of museums have appropriated the term 'rapid response collecting', but at CDC, it's pretty literal,” Shaw said.

The idea refers to the speed-of-light gathering of objects and documentation in response to watershed moments in history. After the September 11 attacks, as a relatively recent example, museums rushed to save missing persons flyers, tribute teddy bears, and similar artifacts.

Staying on top of the news is essential. Shaw saves each day’s New York Times as a chronicle, but says there are internal efforts to form a timeline based on updates from CDC’s Emergency Operations Center. When headlines change by the hour and everything feels story-worthy, it helps to stay focused. Shaw says the CDC also closely monitors internet rumors, tracking how its own messaging gets spread online, and keeps tabs on supply shortages, hoarding, and quack remedies that can have devastating consequences.

“Our mission is to collect, preserve, and interpret the history of the CDC,” says Shaw, who admits that even that can be overwhelming. “CDC guidelines just impact so much.”

Face masks, for example. The CDC website has step-by-step instructions for making them, but the way people interpret those instructions, or how they politicize the masks or wear them as fashion statements, is just one of dozens of stories the CDC Museum may eventually want to tell. Eventually the curatorial team will be in a position to request access to higher-level documentation so it can better understand how the COVID-19 response unfolded.

Though the museum is actively collecting ephemera right now, it doesn’t have plans yet for a COVID-19 exhibition. Shaw notes that big shows take at least two years to develop; one of this magnitude could take five or six.

“We're all going to be survivors of this in some way,” she said. “We don't even know what the right questions are to ask until we have some distance.”

Read more from Conde Nast Traveler: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/how-the-cdc-museum-in-atlanta-is-docume...