Pandemic Paradox
Despite Preparing for Decades, U.S. Response Merits a C-minus ‘at Best,’ Public Health Dean Says
Photo by Stephanie S. Cordle
School of Public Health Dean Boris Lushniak speaks at at a COVID-19 symposium organized by the school in February. Lushniak has spent much of his professional life dealing with disease outbreaks and planning for pandemics, and says the United States seems to have "thrown out the training books" in fumbling its response to the coronavirus crisis.
The attack on the World Trade Center and the devastation of Lower Manhattan. The swine flu pandemic. Ebola’s grim toll in West Africa.
Over a 27-year career as a U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps officer before coming to UMD, Dr. Boris Lushniak, dean of the School of Public Health since 2017, has seen plenty of public health disasters—and thought he understood the gamut of reactions to them.
But COVID-19 has, in effect, ripped up the playbook as the United States continues to fumble its response, he says. The former acting U.S. Surgeon General is now leading the school in a range of efforts to fight the pandemic while helping to guide the reopening of campus for the Fall 2020 semester. At the same time, he’s been battling the misinformation that proliferated along with the virus as a frequent media commentator.
“A major part of my job is helping people to focus on, and understand, what’s real and what’s not,” he told Maryland Today.
Is the pandemic playing out like you expected?
In reflecting on what has been over a 30-year career in public health, and having been through several public health crises … you think you've seen it all, and you know how the world will react. But this one, COVID-19, has been unique. We had a pandemic a decade ago—H1N1—and we were bracing for it to go hog wild on us, but it never did. COVID-19 has been totally different in that regard. My hope is that it’s a once-in-a-lifetime scenario.
What has stood out most for you?
Every country has its own approach; there’s this lack of global unity to deal with it. We have certainly seen our own problems—everything from the issue of who is the communicator on COVID-19, to what are the policies being promulgated, to the question of the CDC’s standing in all of this. We've done a lot of training; I spent 28 years in the federal government preparing for exactly this event, but somebody seems to have thrown out the training books on this one.
What kind of letter grade would you assign the U.S. response?
This is a hard course, because this is a virus no one has ever seen before. It takes some time to build up scientific understanding of what you’re dealing with. Notwithstanding that, overall, this one has been really handled poorly by many entities out there. State and local government have laid off tens of thousands of health care workers in the last decade or so. The administration severely cut the federal government’s ability to respond to a pandemic by, among other things, eliminating the Pandemic Preparedness Office of the National Security Council. In light of the lack of support for the public health structures we need, I give our response a C-minus at best.
What’s your focus as a dean to activate the School of Public Health in this crisis?
There’s important laboratory science taking place in the lab of Don Milton, an expert in virus transmission routes. We’re also doing research that involves socioeconomic factors in the spread of disease. The Maryland Center for Health Equity is looking at racial disparities in how COVID-19 affects populations, while the Horowitz Center for Health Literacy is working to give our community understandable information and tools to help protect itself. And on that same front of wanting to serve our community, we have 20 students who volunteered after the end of the spring semester to do contact tracing to help limit the spread of this virus.
How has the pandemic affected you personally?
Like everyone, we’ve been forced into a scenario we didn’t expect, but I’m always looking at the question of what’s positive in all this? For me, it’s family. My wife and I were empty nesters, and looked forward to the idea of our daughters coming home from college for the summer, and now we’re together again. Old board games are coming out—DVDs we haven’t watched in years and videos of family adventures.
In former President Loh’s virtual town hall meeting in April, you mentioned daily hikes to observe an eagle family. What do they represent to you?
The idea of going on a walk is critical, because sometimes you have to break away from those Zoom meetings and get some exercise. So almost every evening, we head out to see the eagles. We’ve been with them now since mid-March when the babies were born. We recently saw the first flying lesson. What you see is that even in the midst of a pandemic, the world goes on.
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