Tracy’s Guide on COVID-19 – United Chinese Americans

Tracy’s Guide is a series of educational materials created by a coalition of experts, writers, illustrates, and other volunteers. Please bookmark this page and share on social media to help spread the knowledge. The team’s blog is found at https://tracysguide.blogspot.com/

Our Story

“COVID-19: Tracy’s Guide for Families” is a running online series aimed to provide useful knowledge and tips for protecting our loved ones and our home as we work together to “flatten the curve”. As more than 80 percent of Americans are now under stay-at-home orders, learning how to take care of our homes and protect family members is a critical part of the national effort to control the pandemic. In this Guide, volunteers of UCA are gathering valuable experiences from Chinese-speaking regions that are recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, so their hard lessons-learned can be shared with the rest of the world.

Materials in the guide are collated and distilled from the official medical guidelines, prevention books, and published materials, from China and other regions, then adopted into English literature based on American custom by freelance writers, translators and artists. They are also cross-checked and referenced, and combined with those from CDC and various state public health departments, with an aim to bring out these contents to American families and communities in a timely fashion. The guide is the product of teamwork and collaborative effort by more than 40 volunteers and UCA members, both in the US and China. Many of them are healthcare professionals, biomedical scientists, and medical doctors involved in fighting the COVID-19 pandemics since the beginning.

Through a factitious character named “Ms. Tracy”, the key steps in COVID-19 prevention, how to disinfect common household items and areas such as kitchen and bathroom, and how to take care of the sick, are addressed by a lively question-and-answer dialog fashion. The materials are specially organized and illustrated to make it easy to understand, attractive to children, and relatable to the general public. More than 40 articles will be forthcoming, addressing questions and providing know-how in the most commonly encountered situations at home and in community settings.

“Tracy’s Guide for Families” is a public health education project of United Chinese Americans (UCA). The project is initiated and organized by UCA volunteers. UCA and its members have been actively engaged in the relief effort and public health education since the beginning of the pandemics in China. “Tracy’s Guide for Families” project is supported by our content partners, Zhejiang University School of Public Health and Xiaoduo Front Vision. Zhejiang University School of Public Health is an authority of public health policies in China during the COVID-19 outbreak. Xiaoduo Front Vision is a children’s book publisher and educational content provider, and the publisher of Front Vision, a monthly 100+ page comprehensive science and arts publication for children age 9 to 14.

For more information on the Guide, as well as other efforts by UCA members and the Chinese-American community to combat COVID-19 in America, contact Lily Chen: lily.chen@ucausa.org.