Opinion: A deficit of more than 250,000 public health workers is no way to fight Covid-19
What happens when a nation systematically cuts or underfunds its public health workforce? We are seeing an answer to that in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic sweeping across the United States.
Most news coverage has understandably focused on overburdened frontline clinicians. At the same time, epidemiologists and other public health workers in state and local governments are also serving on the front lines. They must conduct rapid case identification and trace contacts for additional Covid-19 testing, isolation of cases, and quarantine of close contacts. Epidemiologists also amass databases for situational disease surveillance, risk factor assessment, and disease mapping.
