UNLV expert: Where do I stand? Six feet away

By Brian Labus

Sunday, Aug. 16, 2020 | 2 a.m.

Editor’s note: As he does every August, Brian Greenspun is turning over his Where I Stand column to others. Today’s guest is Brian Labus, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the UNLV School of Public Health.

Over the past few months, the world has had a front-row seat to watch public health in action. The COVID-19 pandemic is the lead story in every newspaper and on every TV news show. People follow daily case counts like they are following a sports team. I don’t expect little kids to tell their parents that they want to grow up to be an epidemiologist, but it is nice for public health to be able step out of the shadows for a moment.

While people tend to think of the health department as being solely responsible for public health, numerous government agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies shoulder that responsibility.

You interact with this system from the moment you wake up. When you turn the faucet, you expect clean water to come out. When you flush the toilet, you expect that the waste will be carried away and treated appropriately. When you get in your car to drive to work, you assume your car was designed to be safe and that the roads were designed to protect everyone driving on them. If you stop for breakfast, you assume the restaurant is operating in a way that will keep you from getting sick and will keep the employees from getting hurt. You just don’t think of any of these things as public health as you interact with them. You expect them to work without giving them a second thought.

Beyond government agencies like the Las Vegas Valley Water District, the Clark County Water Reclamation District, the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada, and the Southern Nevada Health District, nonprofits like Immunize Nevada and Three Square and businesses like Republic Services play important roles in protecting public health in Southern Nevada.

UNLV’s School of Public Health, the first accredited school of public health in Nevada, also plays an important role, training people to work at these various agencies and conducting research to better understand the challenges we face in Southern Nevada.

These many pieces of the public health system work together to protect the health of the population and provide an environment in which people can live long, healthy lives. A healthy environment (in the broadest sense of the word) isn’t something that can be attained individually and can only come about if everyone agrees that there is value in protecting the health of the population.

There is no better example of this than a situation that has played out too many times through the country over the past few months, when a single person has infected dozens of other people at a party or gathering.

If public health professionals do their jobs well, you never know that they exist. The success of public health is measured in the prevention of disease, and people generally don’t celebrate things that don’t happen. We have described essential retail workers as heroes and have publicly thanked health care workers for their selfless response to the pandemic, but the important contribution of public health professionals to our response has gone overlooked.

Hundreds of overworked and overwhelmed disease investigators, contact tracers, public health laboratory workers, and epidemiologists (among others) have done nothing but respond to COVID-19 since the beginning of this year as the routine work of preventing disease has been put on hold. While Southern Nevada has generally struggled with this outbreak, things would be much worse without their tireless efforts of these public health responders. And ironically, without their efforts, things would actually look much better, as they are the people responsible for describing where we are and where we are headed.

This pandemic has once again revealed a key problem of public health: a lack of funding. It’s hard to make a case for funding when your success is measured by nothing happening. We rely on emergency funding as a temporary solution to problems such as a pandemic, which leaves us without a stable public health infrastructure.

According to America’s Health Rankings, Nevada places dead last, spending just $46 per person on public health each year. That’s less than half the cost of a single COVID-19 test. While the state’s economic problems make it a difficult time to discuss increasing the public health budget, we must recognize that our failure to invest in public health leaves us vulnerable to the next pandemic, no matter how dedicated our public health workers are.

Public health doesn’t just happen during an emergency. When this outbreak is over — and there will be a day when this outbreak is finally over — public health professionals will keep on working to protect every Southern Nevada resident and visitor, just like they did before anyone had heard of SARS-CoV-2. It’s what we do, whether someone is watching or not.