Laona issued the following announcement on July 15.
Fourteen years ago, the health officer in Marathon County spent the better part of a year creating a pandemic preparedness plan. She worked with 13 neighboring counties and two tribal health organizations.
The possibility of a pandemic seemed remote, even to the officer, Julie Willems Van Dijk. But in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, her department had received Homeland Security funding intended to help prepare against biological terrorism and other public health threats. And she believed in being prepared.
In April of 2006, Willems Van Dijk gathered with health officials, law enforcement and local media in Wausau to conduct an exercise. They discussed the way public officials would disseminate information about the pandemic. Representatives from hospitals practiced conducting mass vaccinations, giving flu shots to 400 county employees and their families that day. The idea of the exercise was to practice and plan for what would happen if, someday, there were a real pandemic.
In a 2006 story broadcast by Wisconsin Public Radio, Willems Van Dijk explained what it would mean to have an infectious disease spreading that no one on Earth is immune to. She offered some of the oldest and still most effective public health advice there is: "Stay home."
"Especially before there's a vaccine, stay home. The less contact you have with other people, the lower likelihood you're going to come in contact with someone who’s sick," she said.
Viewed from 2020, the news coverage of the event is a peculiar time capsule. It's a reminder that while COVID-19 is like nothing the world has seen in more than a century, it's not the case that no one saw it coming. Public health officials at all levels have been thinking about — and warning against the risk of pandemic for decades.
A look at some of those plans now shows that experts have long understood the potential of a new infectious disease to upend our lives. However, they may not have anticipated some social and political factors that have shaped the response to COVID-19. As the pandemic worsens in Wisconsin and in much of the nation, in many cases the advice of public health experts on fighting coronavirus still hasn't been adopted.
Willems Van Dijk would leave her Marathon County position in 2009 to work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Population Health Institute. In 2019, she became deputy director of Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services — just in time to be one of the top officials managing the state's pandemic response.
Original source here.
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