This pandemic will show us exactly how much the U.S. government has neglected public health.
Every disaster movie begins with key decision makers ignoring a warning from a scientist. The field and concepts of public health are usually far away from public consciousness. Some people don’t really care about how to prevent something until it has already happened. However, it is unfair for decision makers to give up on their constituents after they make a mistake. They must seek to make informed decisions and enact evidence-based policies and interventions to help the public they are technically serving, even if their actions are not always best for their constituents.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines public health as “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life, and promoting health through the organized efforts and informed choices of society, organizations, public and private communities, and individuals.” The World Health Organization also adds, “[the] combined effort to provide conditions under which people can maintain to be healthy, improve their health and wellbeing, or prevent the deterioration of their health, including the entire spectrum of health and wellbeing, not only the eradication of particular diseases.”
Public health focuses on population and prevention—and is involved with much more than only responding to disease outbreaks. Outbreak containment is dramatized through movies and popular culture, and thus is more present in people’s minds, compared to food, water, or air problems, which some people perceive as less of a threat, but are significant impacts on the health of American and global citizens daily.
According to the CDC, an outbreak describes an occurrence in a community or region of cases of an illness which clearly exceed normal expectancy, while an epidemic refers to a larger geographic distribution of illness. A pandemic denotes a disease affecting the population of an extensive region, country, or continent. The flu is generally not considered an epidemic because there is an expected number of cases every year. If the newly expected cases are higher than the precedent, then it would be considered an epidemic. The COVID19 outbreak is considered a pandemic because COVID19 is not endemic to any regions of the world, and is not in the normal diseases expected to impact people.
In 2014, the world avoided a global outbreak of Ebola due to selfless health workers and probably luck, Bill Gates says, in a 2014 TED Talk, “The next outbreak? We’re not ready” where he critically examines the United States and global response to the Ebola crisis and how we could have done better. He said we aren’t ready for the next outbreak. We can clearly see that prediction in reality today.
The United States has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, but healthcare is not health. Insurance companies and the government create a smokescreen, but at the end of the day, the American people pay this price. The exorbitant amount we spend that sits in the pockets of executives has not helped a bit during this time of global need.
American culture is economy-focused, not humanity-focused. Even so, both the economy and people are suffering right now. Public health infrastructure and policy cannot advance in the US when economics are more important than human life and health. When people are viewed as machinery in an economic system, some will complete analyses that rank people’s lives in lower importance to other economic factors. This is the critical flaw in pervasive American culture, if the goal is to protect people’s lives and human rights. Through two centuries of implementation, the US government has been shown to be negligent to population health, and now we are all suffering for it.
Saikeerthi Naidu is a student at the University of Kentucky College of Public Health and a life-long Lexington resident.
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 10:52 AM.