Dr. Monica Gandhi doesn’t expect you to read her latest book. Though she’s promoting “Endemic: A Post-Pandemic Playbook,” she admitted, “I don’t think anyone wants to talk about COVID right now.”

甘地的名字是那些熟悉的followed the headlines around SARS-CoV-2 over the last three years. The Harvard Medical School graduate is a professor at UCSF and the medical director of San Francisco General Hospital’s Ward 86, the country’sfirst dedicated HIV clinic. But her name hit the mainstream during the pandemic, as she penned reams upon reams of articles, essays and commentary pieces on regional and national responses to the coronavirus, racking up bylines inThe Chronicle,the Atlanticandthe Washington Post, among many others.

“I just couldn’t stop,” she said of her numerous citation-laden opinion pieces, many of which took issue with the way agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the California Department of Public Health, and San Francisco’s own DPH handled the pandemic. “I just thought that these policies were destructive … (and) I thought that it wasn’t going to be good for children.”

For Amy Cleary, director of public policy for lobbying group the Golden Gate Restaurant Association, Gandhi’s voice was a welcome one in the darkest days of the pandemic, when Cleary was tasked with relaying the latest thinking on COVID-19 to the San Francisco restaurant industry.

“She was one of the few expert voices that wasn’t a government official or employee and who spoke to people instead of just laying out rules and regulations,” Cleary said, citingGandhi’s fellow UCSF professor, Dr. Bob Wachter, as the other voice she and many others turned to during the crisis.

“Monica advocated for fewer restrictions than city and state officials required,” Cleary said. “That she was willing to dispute these policies — but wasn’t denying the seriousness of the virus — gave her a lot of visibility and prominence.”

“Endemic” succinctly lays out those disputes, including equitable vaccine access, requirements and restrictions around potential surface contamination, and the continuation of mask mandates once vaccines were readily available. That latter sends Gandhi into what could, with a little work, be structured into a decent stand-up comedy routine.

“It was like, get vaccinated, and guess what? Nothing changes. You still have to wear masks. You still have to socially distance, we’re still gonna close the restaurants,” she said. “Weren’t we waiting for the vaccines to go back to normal? I don’t get it. I just, I genuinely couldn’t believe it.”

With her background in harm reduction, she said she could easily see better ways to encourage vaccinations and help move the world back to normal, one that “wasn’t so gloomy and based in a foundation of fear.”

Her greatest concern, she said, is the impact of school closures on children. Out of all the points of contention during the pandemic, like working from home, restaurant closures and shuttered churches, it’s the shutdown of schools across the country that inspired her to start speaking up. It’s also the only public policy to get its own chapter in “Endemic,” because, unlike some of those other pandemic-era flash points, she said, “I was really interested in children.” She saw firsthand the negative impact online learning had on her sons Vedant and Ishaan, but as students at a private school, they didn’t face the same struggles as San Francisco Unified School District students.

Though a fan and supporter of public schools, Gandhi said she made the decision to educate her sons privately after her late husband, Dr. Rakesh Mishra, was diagnosed with cancer in 2009. “I knew I would be dealing with his illness, and wouldn’t have as much time to spend with them,” she said, so private schools helped ease her burden.

Mishradied in November 2019, just months before the pandemic began. While her sons were home with her for the first few months of the pandemic, their school reopened in November 2020. By contrast, the city’s public schools didn’t reopen untilfall 2021.

“I felt that disparity and how unfair that was,” Gandhi said. “All my patients’ children were in public school. … I remember calling the DPH person who decided to close down the schools, and I said, ‘You’re only going to do this for a couple of weeks, right? You know how important this is, right? School is like No. 1 for children.’ ”

By devoting a full chapter to what she sees as a pointless and harmful shutdown, her hope is that future policymakers will read “Endemic” and see that this isn’t a closure worth repeating.

Policymakers are the likely audience for this book, if anyone, Gandhi thinks. While she wrote the book in a style accessible to the average person, the best case is that it “may be something that someone will pick up in three years,” once the tension, shouting and politics around the pandemic are behind us.

Gandhi hopes her book will be read by members of the medical field like “public health practitioners and infectious-disease people” at some point before the next pandemic — and she’s certain that there will be another pandemic soon. Perhaps then they’ll take the lessons she lays out from the last three years to build policies that are “more realistic,” less restrictive and better for children and other vulnerable populations.

“I just want this book to be a code for the future so that we don’t do it again,” she said. “But I’m sick of talking about COVID. We all are.”

Eve Batey is a freelance writer.