Public Health Officer Thomas Marcellino receives the COVID-19 vaccine.
Public Health Officer Thomas Marcellino knows that, at the end of the day, it’s been his name on the final orders trying to keep Douglas County safe during the past year of the pandemic.
He knows not everyone has agreed with those decisions. But he said he and his team worked together in a challenging, and also rewarding, year to do what they could to help local residents.
“When it’s all said and done, we did the best we could and tried to make the best decisions possible for the health and welfare of the entire county, taking into account the disease itself and other factors,” he said.
After a year unlike any other, Douglas County has now provided 35,101 first round doses and 21,030 second round doses as of Thursday.There have been 8,902 COVID-19 cases total in the county and 84 deaths as of Monday.
In a Monday interview with The Eudora Times reflecting on the past year, Marcellino discussed what the pandemic has been like from his perspective and what Douglas County residents should know as vaccine distribution continues.
This interview has been edited for length.
Eudora Times: So it’s been a little over a year now since we last spoke. For one, what has it been like to have your job for the past year?
Marcellino: Stressful, demanding, rewarding. It’s been challenging. It’s definitely a challenging job in many ways.
How would you say Douglas County handled the pandemic overall this past year?
I think we did an excellent job because of the teamwork that we’ve used. As a county, we were really all on the same page as far as the framework we set up with the Unified Command, which allowed us to take into account the needs of the county and really have a good approach to to make sure we were being all-encompassing when it came to the effects and ramifications of dealing with the virus.
Obviously we had loss of life and that’s something we never like to see, but we’re hopeful that we were able to prevent more loss of life by taking the actions that we did.
Vaccine distribution across Kansas is speeding up a little bit, per Gov. Laura Kelly’s plan. Would you say that vaccine distribution in Douglas County has been and/or will be consistent with that?
In Douglas County, we’ve really done a good job of getting the vaccine out very efficiently and we’re starting to see that in recent weeks, just the amount of vaccine that we’re dispensing is increasing.
I think overall we’re seeing more vaccine availability and better delivery, and we hope to continue to see that. That’s really important for working toward putting the pandemic behind us. We’re in a race with the spread of these variants and trying to prevent another wave of cases.
At the same time, we’re trying to dispense as much vaccine as possible. So it’s kind of a race to make sure we’re doing the best we can to be efficient and get the number of vaccines to beat the spread that could occur with another wave.
What is the county’s approach to addressing those who might still be hesitant or reluctant to receive the vaccine?
I think if you look at the number of vaccines that have been given nationwide and in our state and locally, you see that it’s a safe and effective measure. What we’ve seen is we’ve seen the positivity and the 14-day moving average in new cases drop considerably since we started ramping up vaccinations, and that proves that the vaccine is efficacious and it’s working.
So then you look at the safety profile and it’s exceedingly safe. A number of vaccines have been given nationwide and complications are very, very rare. The way that we’re going to move forward with the pandemic behind us is through vaccination. In order to do that, we’ve got to get everybody on board and as many people vaccinated as possible to make these new variants less dangerous.
Douglas County recently saw its first case of the UK-originated variant. What does that mean for the county? How much of a threat is that?
It means that we’re really in a race. It’s a race to vaccinate as many people as possible, knowing that in the background in our community, we have these variants and the variant has been identified here.
We’re hopeful that we’re able to contain it through contact tracing and quarantining, but you know, with the way our population moves around between states and different areas, it’s very likely that there are other variants and more cases here in those counties.
So it’s very important that we continue to practice the measures that we’ve been doing- masking, social distancing, hand washing because we’re not fully vaccinated and fully protected yet as a community. That’s why those measures will continue to be important moving forward until we can get to that point in time when the experts tell us that we’re able to pull back from masking.
Everybody’s anxious to move forward, everybody’s anxious to get rid of having to wear masks, but now’s not the time to do that. We’re in a crucial state where if we can stay ahead of the virus with vaccinations and with mask usage, it’ll save us potential problems down the road.
When would you say herd immunity/a “return to normal” can be expected here in Douglas County?
There’s a threshold of safety for herd immunity against COVID-19 where a substantial portion of the population would need to be vaccinated. That number varies with different diseases. So if you look at measles, that required 95% of the population to be vaccinated.
For polio, it was about 80%. We really don’t know with COVID-19, so of course we’re going to shoot for a number that’s as high as possible. You could put a number on it and say “Well, 80% of our population is vaccinated, now we can go back to normal.” That’s unlikely to happen at this point.
It’s going to be more of “Let’s get as many people vaccinated as we can and see what’s happening in the area with different variants and with our numbers and with our community dashboard and then make a decision based on where we’re at and how well we’ve done with vaccination” to see, can we pull back all measures and begin to start what we’re calling a “new normal.”
I think we have to realize that COVID-19 is never going to be completely gone. It’s always going to be in the background to some degree.
But in the future, having the vaccine as a tool to really keep the virus at bay will be the most important measure that we can rely on. I don’t think it’s going to be something where you say, “Okay, now we’re going back to normal.” It’s going to be more of a continuum that occurs over time naturally.
In the meantime, as more residents get vaccinated, what parts of “normal life” can they return to right now and what precautions should they continue to implement?
According to the CDC, if you’ve been fully vaccinated, you can gather indoors with fully vaccinated people without wearing a mask. If everybody in your group has been fully vaccinated, then you don’t need to wear a mask.
I would encourage people to utilize the CDC to have guidance on what’s changed if you’ve been fully vaccinated and what hasn’t changed. You still need to really take precautions like wearing a mask and staying six feet apart whenever you’re in public and you have the chance to gather or be around unvaccinated people from more than one other household because that unvaccinated person is susceptible to the disease.
Is there anything else you think residents should know?
Over the past year, we’ve all been a part of this pandemic. That’s affected all of us in many different ways. The things we’ve been through in the community and what we’ve had to do, what we’ve had to sacrifice – some people have sacrificed more than others, having relatives or family members who have lost their life – but overall, we have all been in this together.
And it’s a testament to Douglas County that we’ve been able to come together, work together with all the different groups in the county to have a good unified response and do the best we can. We did the best we could to curtail the spread.
I think as we move forward, we have to look back and say, you know, we have to continue with that unified collective effort to finish the job with not letting up too soon, not giving in and becoming too lackadaisical before the end of the race. We have to finish strong and to make sure that we don’t have any setbacks as we move forward.