News Room

As states try to pick up the pace in administering coronavirus vaccines, they’re asking a wide range of nontraditional workers to step in. And that means people rolling up to get their shot might find a National Guard member, a dentist, or a veterinarian on the other side of the needle. As of Wednesday, the U.S. has distributed more than 36 million vaccine doses, but administered only about 16.5 million. There’s a host of reasons for that imbalance, including inadequate planning, but some health officials are grappling with a shortage of people able to give the shot. After all, health care workers are also busy managing the COVID-19 pandemic itself.

Of the many things that COVID-19 has made abundantly clear to us, surely one of them is a newfound realization that public health has become increasingly complex. Understanding the challenges to public health – that is, the task of guarding the well-being of the U.S. population – is essential now more than ever. As an engineer, design futurist and graduate program director, I have seen how COVID-19 has transformed how public health preparedness is viewed and understood. Some say the pandemic has delivered an urgency for a reimagining of public health. From problems in producing PPE that demonstrate the vulnerabilities in critical supply chains to solutions in vaccine distribution challenges that leverage innovative public-private partnerships, new perspectives and approaches to public health are necessary.

One of President Joe Biden’s first official acts is to require the use of masks and social distancing in all federal buildings, on federal lands and by federal employees and contractors. The White House recommends:

• Every American to wear a mask when they are around people outside their household.
• Every governor to make that mandatory in their state.
• Local authorities to also make it mandatory to support their state’s orders.

Health experts and scientists have repeatedly said that wearing masks and social distancing helps stop the spread of COVID-19. Dr. Julie Swann with North Carolina State University has studied the effectiveness of masks. She leads a team chosen by the CDC to create models for supporting states with their decision-making on the coronavirus.

A growing number of states that have struggled to speedily distribute the COVID-19 vaccine are enlisting the National Guard for help. Washington is the latest. Governor Jay Inslee on Monday said he would deploy the Guard to set up mass-vaccination sites, with a goal of ramping up to 45,000 inoculations a day from a current daily average of only 12,000. Previously, Like most states, Washington had mostly planned to rely on hospitals and pharmacies to distribute the vaccine around the state. But its distribution numbers have lagged. 

The United States is set to mark 400,000 deaths due to COVID-19 about a month after recording 300,000 deaths. Ten percent of all American COVID deaths have been reported in the past 11 days, according to data from the New York Times and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Dr. Ajay Sethi, an infectious diseases expert from UW-Madison, said it doesn't look like the pace for new deaths will slow down any time soon. "[With] our current trajectory, we're gonna be at about half a million deaths in the United States a little after Valentine's Day," he said. The numbers are increasing quickly because of the way the virus spreads, according to Dr. Oguz Alagoz, a professor at UW-Madison who models the spread of infectious diseases.