Making Health Public

As we close the month of June, the United States also closes out the 5th month of COVID response in this country—and we’re not even close to done with this pandemic. In these 5 months, we’ve learned a lot about the SARS-CoV-2 virus which causes COVID-19 and about ourselves. During these months, epidemiologists (like me) have watched in horror as our efforts to control the spread of the disease have been thwarted—sometimes, it seems, intentionally—by people in power. It’s been shocking and heartbreaking to watch case counts here in the United States plateau only to spike again. It’s been particularly agonising watching Nations like the Yakama and Navajo be so consistently denied the resources they need to protect their communities.

As of 28 June 2020, there have been 4,933,972 cases of COVID reported in the Americas region. Of those, 2,452,048 have been reported in the United States. This means that 49.70% of cases occurring in the Western Hemisphere occurred in the United States. For comparison, the population of the United States makes up 33.18% of the population of the Americas Region. This means we have 49.70% of the cases and despite making up just 33.18% of the population. Even without taking into account that the United States as a large, wealthy country should have some of the lowest communicable disease numbers, this discrepancy is shocking.

Something is clearly wrong here and the course needs to be corrected. It’s not impossible to break the chain of transmission, but it takes hard work and plenty of bravery on the part of elected officials. Thankfully, history is littered with success stories when humans have controlled the spread of diseases. For some of these lessons, we don’t even have to look back farther than a half century.

There was a time not so very long ago in human history when we believed that miasmas (bad air) caused illness. Doctors didn’t even wash their hands between seeing patients because how could gentlemen be responsible for spreading illness?

There were no microscopes, so no one could look and see bacteria doing battle with our own immune system. People could only know what they observed and what they observed was that the areas where disease was most prevalent were also very smelly from the dead and dying people.

We know now, of course, that the smell so common in areas where poor people lived wasn’t the cause of their illness, but another product of the things making them sick. Bodies and human waste (lots of poo) left in the streets, rotting food, animals and humans living in close proximity, sewage in the water. Germ Theory tells us that these things become the breeding grounds of virus, bacteria, fungi, and other tiny critters which make us sick. By eliminating those risks from our environment, we eliminate a lot of the pathways those germs take to making us ill.

We've Been Here Before: Learning from Historical Responses to Epidemics

Happy Birthday, Epidemiology!