Believe it or not, it's been five years since the first COVID-19 case was reported in the United States.
It wasn't even called COVID yet when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the case in Washington state. It would take a couple of months for the virus to spread in Florida and for society as we knew it to turn upside down.
But Donna Petersen was already on alert. The professor and former dean of the University of South Florida's College of Public Health led the institution's COVID-19 task force. Petersen worked closely with state and local officials to coordinate response in the greater Tampa Bay region.
She talked with WUSF's Stephanie Colombini about challenges and lessons learned over the years.
The initial strategy, we saw everything shut down, and then that evolved into masks and then the vaccines. Everything was changing month to month, and of course, you saw frustrations grow as people didn't quite understand what was going on, or they were tired of shutdowns, or seriously affected by them.
How was it challenging to come up with your decision-making while social media, the internet, politicians on television, etc., were constantly critiquing and sharing their own ideas, their own theories about how to deal with this virus?
Yeah, I think that made this a very different experience than anything else. You know, we have people that are good health communicators, and there's a science behind how you put a message together and how you communicate risk. I mean, there's lots of people with lots of expertise, but we could not cut through the noise. And the noise was profound and relentless in an environment where we were learning about this in real time and trying to adapt in real time – and remember, the virus itself was adapting, because that's what they do.
And you know, it made most people just mildly sick. It made some people really, really sick, and a lot of people died, but not everybody. So the experience wasn't the same. And depending on the community you were in, your experience wasn't the same, because some of us could isolate at home and work from home, and others of us could not. So a lot of the decisions that were made impacted different parts of the community in different ways, and that made it difficult then to marshal a collective response.
Reflecting on these last five years, what do you think the public health community here got right, and what do you wish went differently knowing what you know now?
We worked very well together, we were very collaborative. We shared everything across hospitals, local agencies, the university, etc. There was just a lot of cooperation, collaboration and sharing, which I think also led to a vaccine being developed as rapidly as it did. As someone said, you know, “People worry that we cut corners.” They said, “No, we just cut red tape.” And I like to say, we made resources available and people were very willing to share.
The state health department did a really good job early on, publishing the information that they had, letting people know how many cases had been reported, how many people had been hospitalized, how many people had died, etc. And that was really important to have as quickly as you could, because again, you could sort of track your own efforts, but you could also try to anticipate what might be coming. We made a commitment at the University of South Florida early on to publish all the data that we had.
The whole team coming together at the university was something I will always cherish. Just all that talent, and no ego in the room at all. People just doing what they needed to do, helping each other, supporting each other, stepping up. I think that was really important.
There have been surveys done of the public in the last year or two, and in hindsight, a majority of people support masking, isolation, shutting down. But what they don't support was how long those interventions were maintained. There was really a feeling that they overlived their usefulness, and I think the data would suggest that's true.
You know, we probably should not have shut down schools. I was trying to think about this, you know, we shut down because we needed time to figure out what was going on, right? When there's a massive food-borne outbreak, you shut down the factory. You stop having the liverwurst from Boar’s Head delivered to your store. You stop to give you time. And so people understood that, but what they didn't understand was, OK, how much time do you need? How much more do you need to know? And I don't think the public would tolerate anytime soon the kinds of things we asked them to do last time. So that’s a concern.
We've seen laws passed here in Florida, and in other states around the country in recent years, banning COVID vaccine requirements or mask mandates; preventing local governments from imposing their own COVID restrictions.
How has that made it challenging to continue responding to this virus that has not gone away, you know, there are still people dealing with long COVID or very concerned about infection if they’re immunocompromised. But also, what does that do to set us up to respond to a future public emergency?
I think there's been a loss of trust in leaders, in public health, in media, in science. That's a real challenge because if we can’t find a voice that people trust, that makes it very hard.
I think for some of us, the other thing that seems to have been lost, if it ever existed, was this sense of community responsibility for each other. That's what public health is: what we do collectively to create conditions in which we can all be healthy. So if people don’t trust public health, they don’t understand public health and they don’t see the need to collectively care for the all, the us, that makes it challenging.
And so I’m kind of at the place where I think while maybe we have some time, maybe we need to reengage the public now in some really honest, deep conversations about, what do we value as societies? What do we care about? Because that wasn't the last one, and there'll be other things. It doesn't necessarily have to be an infectious disease, it could be something else. And you know, we need to be able to respond as effectively and efficiently as possible, and we can only do that if we’re honest with each other and we do it together.
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