The Lake Cumberland District Health Department COVID-19 Departmental Operations Team consists of myself, Shawn D. Crabtree. I have a Masters Degree in Social Work and a Masters Degree in Public Administration and nineteen years of experience working solely in public Health. I am the Incident Commander.
A partial list of my team, who is currently working the COVID-19 situation fulltime, with whom I consult and work with daily, include:
- A Medical Director, Doctor Christine Weyman, who has 28 years of public health experience.
- A Medical Operations Chief, my Director of Nursing, Laura Woodrum, who has 17 years of public health experience.
- An Environmental Operations Chief, my Environmental Director, Stuart Spillman, who has over 20 years of public health experience.
- A Planning Operations Chief, Amy Tomlinson, who has 15 years of public health experience.
- A Liason Officer, a Public Health Preparedness Coordinator from the State Department of Public Health, Jessica Gover, who has 12 years of public health experience.
Additionally, we have robust access to the State Health Operations Center, through the Kentucky Department for Public Health, and all of its resources.
Together, my team has had to utilize our Incident Command Structure and Department Operations Center dozens of times (for example, during the recent Hepatitis A outbreak, during H1-N1, and during Swin Flu). We have overseen hundreds of Point of Dispensing sites where mass vaccinations occurred. Also, my nursing and environmental staff, in general, have conducted thousands, maybe tens of thousands, case and contact investigations.
While COVID-19 is new, your health department response team is not.
Everyone should keep in mind that COVID-19 is a worldwide pandemic that is now wide-spread and community-spread. Nowhere in the world is the strategy any longer to contain this disease; instead, the strategy is to mitigate it (slow it and lessen its impact). Therefore, when COVID-19 enters your home, your place of business, or a long-term care facility, this is expected. While no one can presently contain this virus from spreading, we can mitigate it by observing social distancing (staying six feet from others), avoiding crowds, covering your cough, staying home if you are sick, sanitizing regularly, washing your hands regularly and thoroughly and not touching your face. By taking these steps, we can better assure that not too many people are sick at once, thus overwhelming our local health care capacity to appropriately treat those who are ill.