They should, but they won’t. Generally, health officials are politically fine if people die under their watch; its an accident. It’s if they shut down something and then nothing happens (eg, H1N1) that they usually get fired or thrown under the bus politically. Your neck is on the line each time you shut down something like a school unless something really bad happens, like a lot of people dying from viral meningitis.
The Premonition by Michael Lewis is a really good book, the same guy that did Moneyball and the Big Short on why our health officers aren’t really a unified force to stop fucked up storybook diseases from killing Americans. It’s more like 5,000 individual kingdoms where some people are really on top of it, and some people are totally screwed up and looking the wrong way.
Someday, we will put on our big boy pants and have a competent force that actually prevents stuff like drug resistant tuberculosis from being spread across state lines. Right now, though, health officers are generally too afraid to really enforce getting infected people to take medicines so it doesn’t spread to others, since the risk of getting fired is lower. We also don’t get the best and brightest as health officers because you usually take a giant pay hit by taking the job as a health officer. It’s a multipronged problem.
They should, but they won’t. Generally, health officials are politically fine if people die under their watch; its an accident. It’s if they shut down something and then nothing happens (eg, H1N1) that they usually get fired or thrown under the bus politically. Your neck is on the line each time you shut down something like a school unless something really bad happens, like a lot of people dying from viral meningitis.
The Premonition by Michael Lewis is a really good book, the same guy that did Moneyball and the Big Short on why our health officers aren’t really a unified force to stop fucked up storybook diseases from killing Americans. It’s more like 5,000 individual kingdoms where some people are really on top of it, and some people are totally screwed up and looking the wrong way.
Someday, we will put on our big boy pants and have a competent force that actually prevents stuff like drug resistant tuberculosis from being spread across state lines. Right now, though, health officers are generally too afraid to really enforce getting infected people to take medicines so it doesn’t spread to others, since the risk of getting fired is lower. We also don’t get the best and brightest as health officers because you usually take a giant pay hit by taking the job as a health officer. It’s a multipronged problem.