PLATTSBURGH — Pandemic flus were on Nichole Louis’ mind.
It was late 2019 and the Clinton County Health Department was in talks to work on some emergency preparedness training.
“We had ended up having a roundtable discussion about pandemic flu,” Louis, director of health care services with the Clinton County department said.
“And then, literally that week, we heard what was happening and the conversations that were happening as related to the Wuhan viral spread.”
News briefs and rumors of a curious virus spreading in China that winter would burst into public view that spring as the world confronted the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Now, five years later, Public Health officials in Clinton, Essex, and Franklin counties are reflecting on the lessons learned, the challenges they faced, and how they would face any future threats.
IN THE SHADOW OF SARS
Of course, health officials around the United States were keeping a close eye on the news out of China well before the average American.
Like Louis, Andrea Whitmarsh, program coordinator for the Essex County Health Department, remembers when the first whispers of COVID-19 reached her team in late 2019.
“We have an emergency preparedness program here at the health department, which the exact function of that (program) is to be watching out for things that impact public health or could impact public health,” Whitmarsh said.
For Whitmarsh, those early cautious days brought to mind a threat that had long been on the mind of public health officials: SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome.
A SARS outbreak in 2002 — dubbed SARS-CoV-1 — spread around the globe and led to more than 700 deaths worldwide between 2002 and 2004, according to the National Institutes of Health.
When scientists began examining the 2019 flu cases in Wuhan, the new threat that would come to be known as COVID-19 was named SARS-CoV-2.
So that was the point of reference for Whitmarsh and her team as they came to understand how serious this new threat was going to be.
“There was just this huge unknown of: ‘Okay, is this gonna blow up bigger than it did with the original SARS cases?’,” Whitmarsh recalled.
The early months of 2020 continued to see that uncertainty as officials kept an eye on the situation.
“We were sort of keeping an eye on what we would do locally if anything happened,” Whitmarsh said. “And then, of course, that became quickly a reality in March of 2020 when we had our first case here in the county.”
PUTTING PLANS INTO ACTION
Though officials at all three county health offices said they felt the preparations had paid off, coordinating such a widespread response was not without its challenges.
“Even with all the best preparations in place, there’s obviously always going to be those things that you have no way of knowing what’s gonna happen,” Whitmarsh said.
Hannah Busman, now the Public Health director for Franklin County, was working in Schenectady County at the time and remembers the biggest challenge for her office in those early days was how to quarantine people at home while still making sure they could get everything they needed.
“They needed food, they needed their medications, they needed — you know — all the other things they needed that they couldn’t go out and just get, especially at that time. Things weren’t ramped up to be delivered as easily, and pharmacies weren’t delivering as easily — so that was a big part,” Busman said.
GETTING THE WORD OUT
But beyond delivering physical supplies, another valuable resource proved just as hard to get out to people: information.
“Every day it seemed like there was some new information coming out somewhere, and people were having a really hard time keeping up with the sheer volume of details from the CDC, to the state health departments, and down to the local level,” Whitmarsh said.
Like for many New Yorkers, one of the clearest memories for Busman of those early days was Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s urgent press conferences that often threw whole new changes into people’s lives.
“There were always wrenches thrown in—getting Friday afternoon press conferences from the governor about new regulations that were being put out, and then having to go from there and kind of just going on the fly for some things,” Busman said.
Molly Flynn, principal public health educator for Clinton County Public Health, said their office set up a call center in those days where six or seven members of her staff took nearly constant calls from the public on what they should or shouldn’t be doing.
“We were fielding hundreds of calls every day from concerned community members,” Flynn said.
SOCIAL MEDIA OUTREACH
Along with TV and phone calls, social media exploded as a source of constantly updated pandemic information.
Suddenly, people were checking the pages for county health departments on Facebook as much as they checked pages for memes or TV shows.
Checking Facebook for those brightly colored charts listing infections, exposures and deaths from COVID-19 in the area became a regular part of social media for people around the North Country.
Whitmarsh said the growth of the “Essex County, NY Health” Facebook page rocketed in those early months.
“We might have had a few hundred followers on our page, and within weeks that number grew to thousands,” she said.
From that experience, the health officials said that beyond any guidelines and procedures, they learned that one of the keys to facing a future pandemic was how best to communicate and work with the public.
Having to tell people what they should be doing, even during a crisis, makes many people bristle, they said. Learning how to speak to people to make them want to work together will be key to managing any future emergency.
“We want folks to have the best available information and we want to regain that trust by showing that we’re regular people too, right? We come to work every day and we also have to sift through mountains of information and make judgments and we just want to make sure folks understand that we’re here with the best intentions,” Whitmarsh said.
Busman pointed to the current information that her department was putting out regarding bird flu.
While not wanting to cause undue panic, the department is empowering people by letting them know how to report dead birds they’ve encountered to state officials.
“We share that information with the public to let them know what to do if they encounter such an incident, while also emphasizing that the current risk is very low,” she said.
THE WORK THEY DO
And they all agreed that a silver lining of COVID-19 was how it made the public more familiar with the work Public Health does and that now their social media pages reach a far wider audience to help get out information about important topics for the public.
“We are not just vaccines and contact tracing. We do a lot more than that … whether that’s lead abatement practices, checking on kids’ lead levels, rabies vaccines for their pets, early intervention services for children, you know trying to get those messages out,” Busman said.
Flynn characterized the work Public Health offices do as taking out “the barriers that exist for everybody to live their safe and healthy lives.”
“We’re no longer just sitting in the background doing our Public Health work. We’re sort of on the forefront of their minds here at public health,” she said.
And, indeed, Whitmarsh said that hopefully those connections will help the public look to Public Health more than just during times of crisis.
“With public health, you don’t really hear about it unless something goes wrong and we have to get better about letting folks know when things are going well and the good things we’re doing in the community.”