When the coronavirus pandemic began, local health officials were assured: help is on the way.
That help was expected in the form of supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile, a massive warehouse with shrink-wrapped pallets five stories high, prepared to counter most national health disasters. When an emergency was declared in Long Beach on Mar. 4, 2020, supplies came: only about 2,100 N95 masks for a city of 465,000.
“So, that was not going to cut it,” said Sandy Wedgeworth, the city’s bureau manager for communicable disease and emergency response.
Inside an office space at the Long Beach Public Health Department headquarters, Wedgeworth and five other public health experts gathered Monday around Congressman Robert Garcia, D-Long Beach, for a panel on COVID-19 and how they can prepare for future pandemics.
Findings, Garcia said, will be recorded and brought back to Washington D.C., where he sits on the House Select Subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic.
This comes nearly three months after Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former U.S. chief medical advisor, testified before the subcommittee over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. The hearing quickly devolved into theater, as House Republicans blamed Fauci for “invasive” policies like mask mandates and school closings while also accusing him of playing a role in leaking the virus from a lab in Wuhan, China. At one point, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Georgia, ripped into Fauci, saying, “You belong in prison.”
Fauci has since called the accusations “absolutely false and simply preposterous.”
In response to the meeting, Garcia said that “unfortunately” the subcommittee often focuses on things “that aren’t productive, like conspiracy theories.”
Garcia, entering his sixth year as the city’s mayor at the time, said COVID-19 was “the single largest” challenge faced by the modern world. The pandemic killed more than a million U.S. citizens and hospitalized millions more. It overwhelmed pleas for protective masks and other supplies, eroded public trust in institutions of power and exposed a fragile federal health system.
“Here in Long Beach we lost over 1,300 of our local residents,” Garcia said. “Certainly the hardest thing I had to go through as mayor.”
At the cost of so much, health officials said a lot was learned from the past four years.
The pandemic taught the importance of communicating with the public. Confusing messaging, a tricky business when science changes by the day, only erodes faith in public health institutions.
A lot of attention was placed on rebuilding trust, largely through sharing data and connecting with local organizations.
Sean McCluskie, Chief of Staff for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told the panel that when the new mRNA coronavirus vaccines are stocked on shelves in the coming weeks, they’ll be branded as a yearly flu shot, available to everyone six months and older.
Officials tossed the word “booster,” after research showed that public enthusiasm for the vaccines faltered whenever the wording was changed, officials said.
There was an inconsistent sharing of data during the pandemic, between the federal government, states and health providers, leaving health workers unable to respond quickly enough to a fast-mutating virus. At the local level, Wedgeworth said this translates into unreliable data.
Long Beach has reported more than 1,100 cases and 56 hospitalizations since July, numbers she said are “vastly” underreported as many self-test at home. By comparison, Wedgeworth said they were testing 10,000 people and vaccinating 6,000 people a day at the height of their COVID-19 response.
The COVID-19 response also highlighted the need to properly stockpile vital supplies. Long Beach has since begun to fund its own local stockpile, a 75,000-square-foot facility with “a few weeks” worth of masks, gloves and other medical supplies.
“And as some consumables come close to expiring, we return them to the company for replenishment at no cost,” Wedgeworth said.
When asked what they would change, several city health officials said they’d like to see a restructuring of how their department and others nationwide are paid for, from “rollercoaster funding” reliant on one-time grants and appropriations to something more stable.
Alison King, director of the Long Beach Public Health Department, said the department is constantly hamstrung by this system, as it cannot fill vacancies when funding — i.e. someone’s job — isn’t guaranteed year-to-year.
This comes as more than 70 public health employees are expected to lose their jobs or be reassigned by the end of next month, with most coming from the city’s viral and disease teams despite a local emergency for tuberculosis and a grueling summer surge of COVID-19 cases.
“Just the uncertainty of being within an industry that is grant funded makes it very difficult for particularly young people to be able to take a chance on a career in a place where they don’t know beyond this year if they will have a job,” King said.