Except for a few high profile people like Anthony Fauci in the U.S. and Bonnie Henry in Canada, public health is largely a faceless army of bureaucrats.
In Canada and the U.S. they have not handled the pandemic very well and have not exercised good judgment.
At the beginning of the pandemic, lots of errors were made by the CDC and the FDA in failing to provide adequate coronavirus testing.
The flip flops over the recommendation whether to wear masks or not went on for months, causing a lot of confusion and great difficulty in getting people to follow the current recommendations to wear masks.
Here is another glaring example of “public health malpractice” where the CDC failed to follow fundamental principles and did not quarantine passengers arriving on a flight from an infected cruise ship in Europe.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/flights-cruise-ships-covid-19-60-minutes-2020-10-18
Why are public health agencies doing such a poor job?
It is well known in the medical profession that public health is one of the least desirable specialties and one of the lowest paid, along with family medicine. When medical students select their residency, public health is often a last choice. Those who select public health as a first choice often do so because they think it is not a lot of work. So a lot of public health departments are government services with a civil service mentality and a 9 to 5 work ethic. Although they supposedly train for epidemics, they don’t seem to have been very well prepared at all for the Covid-19 pandemic. They did not learn what other countries have done to handle the pandemic, especially Asian countries who have done a much better job than the US and Canada. A direct consequence of this led to a failure of contact tracing. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/03/world/europe/covid-contract-tracing.html
What can be done to improve public health?
In the long term, the pandemic may actually inspire some of the brighter medical students to go into the field, since it is now more exciting than its reputation has been in the past and it has a lot of opportunities to make improvements.
It’s hard to know what can be done in the short term. In Ontario, calls for the replacement of the chief medical officer started among medical professionals on Twitter and soon became a more public assault. Whether this will lead to improvements in public health in Ontario remains to be seen.
https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/braun-dr-david-williams-forgotten-but-not-gone
In the short term it is still better to follow the advice of public health than to listen to politicians, most of whom have minimal science backgrounds, are out of touch with the realities of Covid-19 and yet are deciding critical government policy at the state, provincial and national level.
Agreed Ernie. Most of our public health officials did not respond soon enough, or were afraid to act. Maybe they were listening to the politicians too much.