Coronavirus Report: The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews Georges Benjamin

The Hill’s Steve Clemons interviews American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges Benjamin. 

Excerpts from the interview are below:

About evenly spreading the benefits are of America’s public heath infrastructure.
{mosads}Georges Benjamin: We continue to throw a lot of money into the system when something bad like this [coronavirus] happens. And then as soon as it goes away, we allow the infrastructure to go away. And by that I mean the funding that pays for the staff, the other basic disease detectives that track diseases like this, the technology that we need to allow to do our jobs. And, you know, it’s that the challenge is that it’s important work, it keeps us safe. Mostly its on prevention. But some of the things we’re seeing right now is the fact the fact that we have not had a robust public health infrastructure in our nation for many, many years.

Clemons: Can you describe for our audience what are the things that go into a public health infrastructure?
Benjamin: Happy to do so. So we have people that follow data so they look at hospital data and see that you know, there’s so many sick people that are happening in a community that you weren’t expecting. Then they go into that community and try to figure out why that is. Then once they know, they come up with measures to prevent it. So let’s say you had a bunch of kids who had asthma — around the community that wasn’t expected. They would go in and try to figure out why those kids had asthma and they would talk to their teachers. They would look at their houses. They would go to the day care. Say, for example, you had a bunch of kids that showed up in an emergency department with asthma attacks. And they did their investigation, and all of a sudden they discovered that the bus tailpipe was broken. Broken tail pipe, noxious fumes. More asthma. And of course, the solution isn’t a medical solution. The solution is to fix the tailpipe. So they do those kinds of things, making sure you wear your seat belt because they’re too many car crashes and people getting hurt in car crashes. Too many people getting sick from a restaurant on a particular day. They go into the restaurant and do an inspection and then make the restaurant, you know, fix up whatever was causing that infection. These are the kinds of things that public health people do every day, and quite often we don’t even know they’re doing it.

What should we do about not having a disease tracking system in place?
Benjamin: We need to rapidly begin training people. More people. We know there’s an estimate that came out a couple of weeks ago About 100,000 more people are needed to help us do this kind of tracking. Then, but more importantly, we actually need a test that’s timely and works. Without a test that is timely and works, you don’t have anybody to track. You don’t know what to track. You’re simply tracking people that have been in the hospital and guessing about who they’ve contacted.

What has been happening with the White House since February? What has your organization been pushing for?
Benjamin: We recognize that the first two tools that we have is good public education about what the risks are and for us to physically distance from one another. And the second thing, of course, is for us to get the testing out. And we’ve been actively pushing the government to get the test out and to get a better risk communication method out to people so that we can physically distance. The second thing we’ve encouraging, of course, is the research to do a vaccine. And funding for the research to do a vaccine as well as to come up with some good antiviral agents, some pills that people can take that you can treat the virus with. As you know, both of those efforts are underway. But they’re going to take some time.

What do you see in the data coming in looking like much of the United States has gotten over the so-called peak. 
Benjamin: Well, first of all, I want to point out that it’s a mixed picture. Yes, we’re seeing a lot of and hearing a lot from those big urban settings that we’re seeing on TV every day and are able to actively communicate what’s happening. … We’re not hearing about all the problems that we’re having in rural America but haven’t heard yet, and we’re not certainly hearing from all communities. So the challenge we have is that each community is at various different states in the development of the disease. The second thing I think is important is that while we are winning, we’re winning because we’re staying away from one another. And now, of course, we’re having a big debate about when do we return our communities back to kind of normal. And our biggest concern is that we may try to do that too soon and too fast.

Can we really see returning to work without a reliable testing program?
Benjamin: Without the test, any other data we get gives us a false sense of security. We have to have a test to understand who’s been infected. And if I get sick tomorrow, whether or not I am infected from the disease. We certainly have got some tests out there, but we absolutely don’t have enough of them for the honest assuredity that was can give the public that it’s safe to return back to normal.

Clemons: Anthony Fauci said he had been approached by members of the Congressional Black Caucus about the very high level of impact, and mortality and infection rates among black Americans, and he said that they were going try to go to where people were, that they were going to try to direct resources to solve this.
Benjamin: Well, the first thing we need to do is make sure that communities of color, like all communities, get the right information and unfortunately, there’s a lot of misinformation that people are getting right now. So we need to make sure that we get the right information to people about how you get the disease and how to protect yourself. The second thing that we absolutely have to do is recognize that many people of color are in those public facing jobs. Bus drivers, security guards, working in grocery stores. Certainly not only communities of color, but all those people in those occupations which are higher risk. We need to make sure they understand how to protect themselves. And those of us who then leave our homes to go shopping and do other things with those essential workers need to make sure that we’re doing what we can to protect them from us. 

Clemons: What are some of the examples of misinformation out there?
Benjamin: Well, the first one was several weeks ago that African Americans were immune from the disease, which of course, is not true. A misunderstanding about what happens when we said, well, you know, if you’re older and you have a bunch of chronic diseases, you’re much more likely to get sicker and die. People heard that as boy, if I’m young and don’t have those diseases, I’m also not going to get sick — which, of course, is also not true. And I think we’ve heard all kinds of crazy myths about diets and drinking hot water. And because people say, Well, the virus doesn’t live in the heat. Of course, that’s not true as well. And so people doing home remedies that they think might might help them and save their lives. You know, drinking more vitamin C, doing these kind of thing. Vitamin C is great for you. It’s great for your health, but it’s not going to impact the course of this disease.

 
On President Trump’s defunding of the the World Health Organization

Benjamin: We strongly support the World Health Organization. The World Health Organization is doing the best they can with the resources that they have. … Nobody does these kind of emergencies perfectly. But I got to tell you, we also screwed things up very early on, and so we should not do that to the World Health Organization. By the way, the World Health Organization is there to help many, many nations that can’t help themselves without their help. If we pull funding from then now, we think it will be a crime against humanity because so many people in those communities will die without our help and without our funding.

As we look forward, what do you think we need to do to make sure we are better prepared in the future?
Benjamin: We should pretend that we are back in January when this first thing happened. And we should do now what we should’ve done back in January. We need to make sure that we have an adequate testing system and a great test to test who have the disease and who had the disease before. We ought to have an organized effort to make sure that all of our front-line health care workers get all of the protection gear that they need. We need to make sure that we actively communicate to the public what we know, and what we don’t know so we can build trust in this response. And then we need to begin right now preparing for the rest of this year. Because even if this disease is markedly reduced in the next few weeks, we’ve got to worry about it coming back next fall or winter.