[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC STING] - We're now joined by Dr. Christina Tan, New Jersey State epidemiologist.

Good to see you Dr. Tan.

- Good to see you too, thank you.

- Is it about "Living with COVID," which is a new series on NJ Spotlight News, people should check out every night or is COVID over, living with it, post, what is it?

- We are living with COVID-19 right now.

We have many years of experience with and COVID-19 and we're still just starting to learn more and more about COVID every single day.

But, yes, we're in a stage where we're living with it.

- Biggest lessons, three years plus into this pandemic, biggest lessons in terms of the role of state government as it has to do with a pandemic, an epidemic, a health crisis.

- Our role as in state government with working on the COVID Pandemic is to monitor the trends of COVID disease so that we can hopefully be able to offer good and sound public health recommendations for people to take actionable items so that they can protect themselves from COVID.

I think, we have been very lucky to be living in a time where we have terrific vaccine technology and we were lucky that we were able to characterize what was going on with COVID-19 in a fairly rapid clip and then develop vaccines so that we have a very valuable tool to help prevent disease moving on into the future.

- Dr. Tan, how challenging is it for a public health professional in government to get out accurate, useful, relevant information when there's so much "misinformation, disinformation" on the internet, social media platforms that often confuses people?

- It's very challenging to get information out there because as we know about how science works, is that science evolves based on new information and new data on a day-to-day basis and sometimes much faster than that and it's important for us at the governmental level, whether it's at the local, the state or the federal level, to make sure that we try to get the information out as quickly as we can, accurately, and also be willing to accept that things are evolving and sometimes we may not get things completely correct at the time, but we try to work at our hardest with the best knowledge that we have at any given time.

- Do you believe that the FDA, the Food and Drug Administration is anywhere close to coming up with or whomever in government or in the world of science innovation, coming up with a single COVID vaccine?

- Well, we do know that FDA working along with their scientific experts are working their best to try to understand more about the science about COVID-19, the epidemiology, to be able to inform them to move toward understanding what are gonna be the best strains moving forward to include in the vaccine, number one.

Number two, to try to determine when is the best time to give the vaccine, is it going to be in the fall?

Is it gonna be some other timing?

And then, finally, also considering things like scheduling and what we mean by scheduling is that there may be some populations based on what we understand about COVID-19, there may be some groups that may benefit from more doses of the vaccine, such as older individuals, children, individuals who are living with immunocompromise.

So our FDA, our vaccine experts are all working really hard on all those fronts to make sure that we have an appropriate vaccine that works for our population at large.

- Dr. Tan, I know this is not a decision, I don't know if you're involved in but I know you didn't make a final decision, we had Governor Murphy and I asked people to check out our website, steveadubato.org, it'll be on your screen.

I asked the governor, I think, in three separate interviews in the last couple of years about the role of state government in making the decision that was made as it relates to people in nursing homes, going back into nursing homes those who were treated for COVID going back and the 9,000 plus people who died in those nursing homes.

The governor believes that the right decision was made with the information that was had, that was in hand at the time.

In retrospect, was that a mistake?

- I agree with the governor.

We had rapidly evolving information about the disease and progression and it wasn't just an issue that was solely here in New Jersey, but we were seeing that long-term care facilities, nursing homes, were impacted in a big way nationwide and that this was something that we had to devote more attention and resources to moving forward.

- How prepared do you believe government is and, again, you mentioned local government, local public health officers, the state government, county government, federal government, how prepared do you think government in terms of public health policy and implementation, how prepared do you truly believe we are for a potential "next pandemic?"

- With every single new pandemic or emerging infectious disease, government agencies as well as all of our partners in healthcare and other sectors do come together and try to learn from those particular experiences and I think where we benefit the most from preparedness is making sure that we foster those relationships among all of our partners.

I would say that probably it's the building of those relationships among healthcare, among public health that has been one of the greatest strengths of this pandemic response and that hopefully will serve us well moving into the future.

- I wanna thank Dr. Christina Tan, the state's epidemiologist for joining us, also for those suffering, dealing with Long COVID, again, check out NJ Spotlight News.

They kicked off this series, "Living With COVID," looking at the implications, the impact and actually the experience of those who are living with Long COVID, Many of us want to "get beyond this," we're past it, but for many, they're living with it, dealing with it and still suffering from the effects of Long COVID.

Dr. Tan, thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you.

- Stay with us, we'll be right back.

- [Narrator] State of Affairs with Steve Adubato Is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by The Turrell Fund, supporting Reimagine Childcare.

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