(upbeat instrumental music) - Hello and welcome to The Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

We're moving through the summer, approaching the fall, we're still dealing with COVID-19, but there are other issues too we need to be aware of as well as the COVID-19 information.

We're joined by Wood County Department of Health commissioner, Ben Robison to discuss where we currently stand with COVID and some of the other related issues that have come out of that.

Commissioner Robison, thank you so much for being here today.

- Thank you, it's a privilege to be here as always.

- Yeah, now let's talk about, there's all kinds of information's out there from any number of sources, where do we stand today with COVID-19 in Wood County, in the area, that sort of thing, talk about the status now, so people can maybe get a clear picture of what's happening today as we talk.

- Sure.

so as we sit here today, over the last week, we've had 13 cases in Wood County.

Now that's a bit of an increase from where we had been, we had gotten all the way down to just a couple of cases over the course of the week, which was fantastic.

So we're watching this closely, it could be due to the 4th of July holiday, we certainly have seen upticks that are related to holidays there, but we also understand that it could be due to concern with additional spread that's beginning to happen, driven largely by this Delta variant.

When we look across all of Ohio, many of our counties just a week or two ago were mostly in the low transmission level as defined by the CDC.

Today, most of our counties are in the moderate transmission level and we do have more and more counties that are moving into the substantial and high levels.

These would correspond to rates at a hundred cases per a hundred thousand, or 200 cases per a hundred thousand as we used to think about those when the state did their dashboards.

So, we certainly are seeing an increase in cases again and we are concerned that that could continue to spread as the Delta variant becomes more prolific.

- Now, as far as the Delta area, I know that we're recording this today, it's gonna, it'll be a couple of days downstream by the time people see this, right now in Wood County, any Delta variant at this moment as we're talking right now?

- So, as of right now, we have not been reported to us that we have the Delta variant, but let me say this, we anticipate that we will have it and if our experiences, is like the experience of other places that have had it, it will become the dominant variant here as well.

So, if you look back at the UK, go back to the end of April, only a very small number of their cases were caused by Delta variant, now more than 99% of all their new cases are caused by the Delta variants, so we anticipate our experience will be similar, so if we find out we have Delta variant in a week or two, I wouldn't be surprised it's what we expect to have happened.

- Yeah.

Now, one of the things that of course is essential to this and it has been from the day they became available, vaccination is still our best weapon against this and there's a lot of information out there, a lot of misinformation, but that is the case, you're much better off to be vaccinated in terms of actually getting COVID, whether it's the original version, or it's the variant, how do we stand in terms of vaccination rates and that sort of thing in our area right now.

- Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right, vaccination is still our best defense, not only in preventing transmission from person to person, people who are vaccinated not only protect themselves, but they also are, are much less likely to spread the disease to others if they do become a case, but also in reducing severity of the disease.

And so, we definitely do hear about people who have been vaccinated that become cases, but in the vast majority of those cases, they're in convenience, they are at home, they're comfortable, they're protecting the community and even in their households, they usually are not spreading it to their family members, because the vaccine is working.

So, just wanna encourage people that an effective vaccine isn't just one that prevents you from getting sick completely, but it's also one that protects you from hospitalization and death.

Along those lines here in Wood County, we are just under 53% of our whole population has been vaccinated with at least one dose and when we look at our adult data, a little more than 60% of our adults 20 years old and older have been fully vaccinated in the county and almost 70% of adults, 30 years old and older have been fully vaccinated in the county.

We look at our youth numbers, the 12 to 17 year olds, we estimate that just under half of them have received at least one dose of vaccine here in Wood County.

- Yeah and those sound like pretty good numbers, because you hear numbers from other jurisdictions and they aren't as positive sounding as those are, below 40% in many categories, that sort of thing.

As we look at and I think you touched on this too, that the pandemic, as we've dealt with it, most people aren't familiar with how that rolled out, but as you touched on vaccination and transmission and that sort of thing, when you explain how the pandemic took place, how do you explain it in terms that people can understand it and how we got from where we were at the beginning of it, to where we are now and again, what the tools are that work best to deal with this?

- Yeah, so in order for us to have a pandemic, there are three criteria that have to be met.

So number one, it has to be a disease that can spread easily and in a sustained fashion from person to person.

So that's the first criteria.

The second is it has to cost severe disease and the third is, it has to affect at least two of the regions as defined by the World Health Organization at the same time.

So, if only one region is there, they have an epidemic, but we don't have a pandemic.

So, COVID of course matches all three of those conditions, but what the vaccine can do is it allows us to reduce the severity, potentially undoing the pandemic impact, as well as reduce the transmission, further impacting the pandemic.

And when you can reduce transmission and reduce severity, you also have the opportunity to control it more effectively.

So, when the pandemic began, what we only had at our disposal were those initial tools that would delay the onset of disease and push back the curve to when those diseases would peak.

So, you talked about her lot early on about flatten the curve or move the curve, right, that was the goal, was to try to get this something that was controllable and that what brought us critical time to allow for development like therapeutics, like a remdesivir that we have access to, these monoclonal antibodies as well as a vaccine that gives us new tools, so, these strategies of isolation, quarantine, mask wearing, distancing, these are time tested strategies that have been used for hundreds, if not thousands of years, to combat disease, they still work today and when we don't have access to technology, they're our best and our only defense in the beginning of an endemic.

- One of the things you'll hear is people say, "Well, I know people who have masks" and I'm being devil's advocate here, because I don't understand perfectly what you're saying about this, who'll say, "Well, wearing masks didn't work, "people still got sick," so how do you address that approach to it that well, people wore masks and there were still people getting sick, so obviously, masks don't do anything?

So could, respond to that a little bit.

- Well, let me by point of comparison, compare it to other diseases.

So, last year's flu season was essentially nonexistent.

I was talking to a colleague who had shared, they were talking with their hospital system, their hospital system at one point, I think it was December or January, had done 1500 tests for influenza and all of them were negative, which is just unheard of at the peak of a flu season.

So, we know that the mask had effectiveness, because we saw it's impact in other diseases.

But the fact that COVID still spread more than anything else reveals that COVID just really is that transmissible.

It is much more transmissible than others and diseases do vary in their transmissibility, measles for instance is a very transmissible disease and there are documented cases of somebody with measles leaving a room and 30 minutes later, someone coming into the room, sitting far across a room and getting sick, so measles is very transmissible and diseases vary in that range.

So the fact that that people got sick isn't a limitation on the mask wearing per se, but an indication of how transmissible it is and certainly there also is something called user error, certainly we saw not every use of masks was as consistently and effectively done as in other venues, so hospitals did great, our schools did great, but not all of us had had the opportunity to use them as effectively as those venues did.

- Well, we come back, I'd like to ask you too about immunization in general, because you are hearing some information, some stories that not only are people a little, some people are reluctant about the COVID vaccines, now they're starting to become reluctant about vaccines that we've used for years and years and years, so we come back, let's talk and see the impact if it exists with regard to how people are reacting, just to vaccines in general now.

We'll be back in just a moment with the commissioner of the Wood County Health Department, Ben Robison, here on The Journal.

Thank you for staying with us on The Journal, our guest is the health commissioner of Wood County, Ben Robison.

Last segment I touched on at the end, there's a concern now in some quarters and you're hearing some information again, it's a lot of information out there and things that a lot of people now or some people are concerned about getting any kind of vaccine, because of their reluctance with COVID, are you seeing that and explain how vaccines have worked over the years and how successful they are, but that is a question out there, people are like, "Well, I'm not sure I wanna get any vaccine for anything "anymore and especially my children," so, let's go down that path a little bit.

- Sure, so I've seen every combination of positions with regard to vaccine, folks that are all for the COVID vaccine, folks that are opposed to any vaccine and then every combination in the middle, so folks that are getting this one, but don't get others and folks that get others and aren't getting this one, at least not yet, so.

I think that one of the big factors that I keep hearing about is people are anxious to see the full FDA approval for the COVID vaccine.

Now, we think Pfizer is gonna go first and the FDA did announce that at least by January, that that full approval will be in place.

I hope that that's a situation of underpromise and overdeliver, I hope that they're able to approve it sooner than that, but I really applaud them for taking the time to go through the process judiciously, we wanna be certain that once they approve it, we've crossed all of our Ts and dot all of our Is, because we don't want anyone to have any questions about that, so.

I love that they're taking their time, I hope it's sooner than that, but if it takes that long, that's great.

So, that's one big thing, I think the other thing too is that as people look at this, I think vaccine preventable diseases don't feel as urgently impactful as they did maybe before, so we don't really hear about measles outbreaks all that often anymore, we certainly don't hear about smallpox outbreaks or polio outbreaks, at least not here in the United States and so it gives us the sense that we don't need to take these vaccines, because we are already protected, but the reason we're in the situation that we're in now is because of effective vaccines that have been used for decades to protect people before they were exposed to those diseases.

So, rather than sort of waiting to see what could happen, it's better to get that vaccine.

And here's the thing too about COVID, people talk a lot about, well, I'd rather deal with the consequences of COVID than deal with the potential side effects of a vaccine.

So, a couple of things on that point, number one, the major impacts from a vaccine happen within a couple of months and the data after a couple of months is really strong.

Number two, any sort of lingering impacts usually take about six months to find as they have longer term data and may have larger numbers of people get those vaccines.

We've seen the transparency in this process with the reporting on mild carditis for the Pfizer, Moderna vaccines, certainly Johnson & Johnson has has added warning labels regarding the impacts of Guillain-Barré and the clotting disorders, but that's the process working, that's what we want people to be aware of so they can make good decisions for their own health.

But these outcomes are also exceedingly rare.

It took tens of millions of doses to even find these, because they happen so infrequently and that's a really good sign.

By contrast, some data that's coming out of a recent UK study found that, of people who had symptoms for COVID, up to a third of them were still experiencing at least one symptom 12 weeks later, which is about double previous estimates.

We hear about long haulers who have lingering effects and we don't really know what the long-term effects of COVID will be either, so take chickenpox for instance, when I was a kid I had a chicken pox party with other friends, now at 55, I'm gonna need to get my shingles vaccine, because I'm at risk for shingles.

My kids by contrast had been vaccinated against chicken pox, because we wanna prevent the risk of shingles down the road, so we don't know for certain that there'll be a COVID equivalent of shingles, but there could be and so preventing the potential impact of diseases now is always better than waiting to see what the impact of the disease itself might be.

- Yeah and that's a really good point that, not only have you, we've impacted in the case of the chickenpox vaccine, dealing with that immediate particular disease, it prevents potentially and probably in reality, the shingles downstream, they won't have to worry about that, as you said, because they never contracted chickenpox, therefore you've eliminated, probably with almost complete certainty, the chance that they could get shingles, so it's a double win and that's what vaccines are supposed to do is, as you said, be preventative as well as something that we deal with in this situation that we found ourselves in with COVID, so, that's a really good point, how work beyond their initial application really, so that's an important point.

When you look at, 'cause we're coming up on the school year and children of course are supposed to be immunized, or have, there are certain things they're supposed to be immunized for.

That process is ongoing, I guess that's the other question I have too, we focus on COVID a lot, but your business, health department business, all those other health related things still continue while this is going on as well, that hasn't been moved off to the side, so talk a little bit about how you've continued to provide all those other service you do, while still handing this really significant endemic that just showed up in your lap, sort of.

- Yeah, I mean, no doubt about it, no one expects to have a pandemic sort of occur whenever it occurs, we know they're possible, but they always are a surprise for everybody and for us, our job as a health department is to create an opportunity where people can have their best health.

And so, things like inspections in water and our vaccine program for kids, our home visiting programs and our health center have continued to operate.

We have continued to provide supplemental nutrition through our WIC program to recipients every single week through a largely drive-up service, which has been great and these things are essential to help to ensure that people can still be healthy, even while there's a pandemic going on around them.

We, as we look at all of this and we think about the school year going back, it is true that schools are gathering all that information for childhood immunizations to make sure that people are ready to be there, Ohio law provides a list of diseases against which kids have to be vaccinated.

Unless they provide evidence of an exemption, or a medical leave that that would prevent them from having to be vaccinated and that's a really great tool to help to keep our classroom a safe place, so kids can be there and we are excited that as of right now, we know that all of our districts are planning to go back in person.

Being in person is so critical for the development of kids, provides them the support network.

For my own kids, I can tell you that, when they were able to be in school in person, it was a huge benefit to them and they really enjoyed it and I think that the educational experience for them was really heightened, so we're excited that's gonna happen and what we saw last year was that when those precautions are used, the classroom is a really safe place and it's a place that kids can continue to attend, even with COVID going on in the community.

- Now and on top of that too, we're focused on the kids and that is really important, but for the people that work in those schools, it's a much better situation too, because they don't get the interaction with the students they would normally get when everything is virtual or hybrided, that sort of thing, so again, it's a better situation for all concerned when we have that safe situation for them to go in and be face-to-face in a school or a university, or whatever the particular institution is, so it looks like a better picture than it did last year at this time, as we approached some of the things going on in the schools.

When we come back, there's been and I know that there's been, of course with COVID, there's been a lot of activity in Columbus with regard to regulation and things of that nature, so when we come back, let's talk a little about some of those things and how they're impacting what you do and how you do it and how it will impact the population at large, so, we'll be back in just a moment with the commissioner of the Wood County Health Department, Ben Robison, here on The Journal.

You're with us here on The Journal and our guest is the commissioner of the Wood County Health Department, Ben Robison.

Touched on at the end of the last segment, with COVID, the pandemic arriving in Ohio and then of course, all over the world, state legislatures have kind of weighed in on different ways that they feel future pandemics, future situations like this should be addressed versus the laws that were in effect when we entered this, 14, 15, 16 months ago, so, talk a little bit about some of the ways that's being addressed and how you folks are adjusting, or how those rules are gonna impact, not just how you do your job, but the population at large.

- Yeah, so I appreciate that question.

One of the first law that really had direct impacts and got a lot of press coverage was Senate Bill 22 and that one was really primarily directed at what happens between the governor and the state house and described sort of limitations and considerations for when the governor issues orders and what those orders mean.

But there are also some provisions added in there about how local health departments take action in response to disease and there are particular challenges with regard to issuing isolation and quarantine orders that are new and among those requires a certain process of medical diagnosis that was not previously there.

So, previously local health department had the ability, if we suspected a disease of concern like ebola, which we do monitoring for, we could ask someone to be tested and if they refuse we could actually order them to be tested, to ensure that they weren't spreading a public health disease of concern.

On the front end of that diagnosis, there is actually nothing a local health department can do and so if a person is not willing to be compliant, we can't compel them to do that.

It's worth noting that these orders are not used very often, they are a really infrequent tool and it is not something that in my entire time here we've ever had to do, so I joined Wood County Health Department in September and my entire time we've never issued a single order and I believe in the entire pandemic, we only issued one order related to COVID after the person was not responding to follow up with health department, so, they're used, when appropriately used they're judicious and they were infrequent, but we need them to be able to be effectively implemented and so we have to understand how Senate Bill 22 will have direct impact on us and really navigating those waters.

It brings some uncertainty to a process that's been in place for a long time.

The other one that is newly passed and signed into law, I believe back on July 14th was House Bill 244 and what House Bill 244 does is that it takes focus particularly on FDA vaccines, or FDA, EUA vaccines like the COVID vaccine, that are not fully approved, but people may have gotten them.

And what it basically says is that schools may not require people to refrain from engaging activities, or take precautions that people who got one of those vaccines, they themselves would not have to do.

And so basically what it says is that for a public school or a public university, they have two choices, everybody does it, or nobody does it, but you can't take a look at what the guidance might be to allow that vaccine status to inform how those actions, those individuals might differ.

That law is set to take effect on October 12th and so as we look ahead, it's gonna be a challenging landscape, because things like with the CDC saying, for instance, that if you're fully vaccinated, you don't need to wear a mask.

For schools, if they believe masks are important, it can be everybody, or it can be nobody, but they can't differentiate based on House Bill 244, that mask use.

So, there are gonna be some really important concerns there, whether it's masks or it's time in the classroom.

I understand the heart of it and I concur that we wanna make sure that people are being supported and respected, certainly our guidance here in Wood County is that we wanna build community as much as we wanna prevent the spread of disease, because if we don't have a strong community, disease spread or not, we're not gonna effectively overcome this pandemic, so we want to have each other's backs and I know that the state house was concerned about people being compelled to do something when they would do things like miss field trips and other things, but we're gonna have to wait to understand more fully what the full implications of this could be and recognize that we'll have to work really closely with our schools to navigate those potential impacts as we move farther on in this pandemic.

- And again, this is purely hypothetical, but if these new regulations had been in effect when we first encountered COVID-19, would they have been a help or a hindrance, do you think?

And I know I'm asking for an opinion and whatever comfort level you'll have there, but it seems like it does make it difficult to address things in a quicker manner, at least from a layman's perspective and maybe that's a misunderstanding of what these laws are supposed to do, but it just feels as if they're making the process a little more difficult to get to the result that we would all like, which is making sure we don't have another pandemic.

- So, on the the Senate Bill 22 front, really many of those impacts apart from what I described, are more with the governor and they probably are better equipped to weigh in on that.

With regard to House Bill 244, it probably wouldn't have had much of an impact and that was because, back at the beginning of the pandemic, no one was vaccinated, so we only had one choice, everybody did something or nobody did it.

But as you move ahead and we want to take advantage of these additional guidance and the benefit of being vaccinated, this will create some challenges within the public school environment and the public university environment that are different than exist in other industries and other sectors of our community, so, it really is a unique challenge for that particular venue, because we know that, like for elementary school kids, no big deal, 'cause nobody can be vaccinated, they're all too young, but when you get to middle high and junior high and high school, you get to a place where your vaccine status will vary and so we're gonna have to understand how to navigate those waters and we're going have to do that collaboratively with our schools, we've had a great relationship, we wanna continue that and this is just create some additional layers for us to work through as we navigate this pandemic in the education environment this year.

- And as we all know, we're all, we continue to learn the processes, we need to learn what this is and what it's not and that, so it's, yeah, it's an educational experience you said.

Once a pandemic, once in a lifetime sort of thing and hopefully that's the case, and maybe what we've learned from this one we will be able to apply in a more appropriate way the next time, knowing what it can be like.

Shifting gears a little bit and then we touched a little bit on it in one of the earlier segments, besides and you talked about food inspection, that sort of thing, one of the things you've just done in a real positive note is you do something called the Clean Plate Awards, which basically recognizes food service providers that have met a certain criteria, so talk a little about that, 'cause that's a positive thing, people can feel comfortable that when they go out to eat, or wherever they're interacting with a food provider, that things are the way they should be.

- Yeah, the Clean Plate Award is a great program, this is actually the 10th year of the Clean Plate Award and for a food operator who believes that they've done a great job, they can apply to be recognized through the Clean Plate Award and what it essentially means is that at a minimum, you have met at least 95% of all of the inspection criteria that we provide.

None of those criteria that were missed can be a critical violation, which are really significantly involved with disease, with foodborne outbreaks and impacts on diners and you also have to maintain your current licensure and have had no complaints against you and no outbreaks associated with you.

And so, when all of that is said and done, that creates for us our recipient group of our Clean Plate Award, so we're really honored to do that again this year and we actually had two businesses here in Wood County that have won the award every year, all 10 years, the first is the Wood County Committee on Aging and the second is Rita's Dairy Bar and so those two have consistently won this award.

We suspect that as we move forward, we'll have others that have won it 10 years as we go, there are a few that had only missed it one year and so these are the leaders in our food industry and certainly we encourage people to take a look at that, give them their praise as you go visit those locations and they are really setting an example for how when public health and business work together, we can have great outcomes.

- Okay, yeah, that's very good to hear because that way people can feel confident that wherever they're going to get food, that yeah, that you have that in place.

We have just a few seconds here, if people have any questions about any of these topics or anything related to COVID-19, what's the easiest way for them to get in touch with you folks with the Wood County Department of Health?

- Probably the easiest is to visit our website at www.woodcountyhealth.org.

We have information on there about vaccine clinics coming up, COVID 19 information for what's happening here in our county as well as linking you to resources and other things that will help you to navigate, whether you're looking for COVID or you're looking for programs that we do here at the health department, all of that stuff can be found there.

That's also where you can find phone numbers that are important and if you give us a call, we can get you connected to the right people, so that we can provide you additional information or have a conversation if that's what's warranted.

- Great, fantastic.

Well, that's good information and people shouldn't have any problem finding the information because it's right there on your website woodcountyhealth.org.

Ben Robison, thank you so much, Commissioner at Wood County Health Department, we'll have you on again in the future to talk, maybe a greater amount of time on something other than COVID, but that's still forefront for everyone, so we appreciate you taking the time and appreciate all that you folks do there and all your employees and all the other staff members there as well, that provide us with that safe environment when we go out, so we appreciate that very much.

Thanks again for being here.

- [Ben] Thank you, it was a privilege as always.

- And you can check us out at wbgu.org and of course you can watch us this week on WBGU PBS, we'll see you again next time on The Journal.

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