YouSaid · the spoken record

Charity Dean

lines on the record: 85
first: 2021-07-30
most recent: 2021-07-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Out to all those people. Right now, the way they share information is fax machines and emails and phone calls, and that cannot move as fast as the pathogen.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a number of approaches. They certainly include intelligence, leveraging everything, all the technology that we have in Silicon Valley has not hit the public health system. And in disease control, largely the decisions and the operations are done manually or by individuals. I was the individual doing that. And so there's an incredible opportunity with Silicon Valley innovative technology to apply it to disease control. There's also the operational aspect of it, meaning looking at local public health, health departments. They are the frontline generals. They're on the ground. You know, my job is Michael describes in the book was to control disease by all means necessary. So operationally as a country, I really think it's important that we rethink who's doing the frontline operations. Do they have enough resources? And do we have a way to quickly get centralized intelligence?”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We still have the same systemic problems. Look, the United States and companies and government have essentially duct taped together a response to COVID with individual vigilance and individual heroic efforts, but neither of those are an effective strategy in the long term for managing what we now know as an existential risk to the US economy. And so if a different pathogen threat were to occur today, we are no better prepared. And that's what I'm really focused on again, not just for private sector or for government, but as a whole of society response. What are the system solutions for the country to contain a fast-moving novel pathogen that occurs simultaneously across the U.S.?”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People don't know who to trust. And instead of discounting them, the more interesting conversation to me is how might we as one united country build the kind of system, solution and leadership that a whole of society would trust, even if they have different political beliefs, you know, red and blue, extreme sides of the aisle. So I think it's really a systems failure of government institutions in this pandemic response that we're at the point where people are so politicized that getting a vaccine or not, which is just pure science, is now made out to be full of conspiracy theories.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, my 14 year old and 12 year old every now and then will send me some videos that they see circulating online that have conspiracy theories. And I watch them because I want to understand why people are scared and hesitant. And I think it's important not to discount their fears. At this point in the pandemic,”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The virus is going to mutate and it's going to spread and it's going to mutate to spread. So, of course, we see a strain of the virus that spreads easier. It won't be the last strain. There will be more. It will continue to mutate.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. You know, this, I trust the behavior of this virus far more than I trust the predictive behavior of people. Why? Pathogens do exactly what we know they'll do. I love studying pathogens. I love outbreaks. I love Darwinian competition.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, protect grandma. That's worked incredibly well in Mexico, which is a different set of cultural values than we have, where the message of protect grandma really, really works. In the United States, what we know works more is protect the vulnerable children around you, protect the vulnerable people around you. So I don't know. I mean, it's a hard conversation with people that are vaccine hesitant today, but they need to understand that Delta variant is spreading so quickly. And it's just the variant of the day. There will be additional variants that emerge.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's a real challenge where politics and misinformation has unfortunately found its way into science messaging. I struggle with it when I have those conversations with people. What we know from public health vaccine efforts in the past is that coming down with a hammer doesn't work. It tends to”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the people that they love and the people that they love because the situation, the reality is this. People have two choices. They can get vaccinated or they can get COVID. With adult a variant that has an R0 of five to eight, those are their two choices. You get vaccinated and protected or you are going to get COVID because this is spreading. So rapidly.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think, and I get asked this question a lot around vaccine hesitancy. And it's one of the oldest issues in public health. It actually goes back to Jacobson v. Massachusetts in 1905. The right of the individual to decline vaccination versus the protection of the herd, the good of the whole. And we've dealt with this a lot in California. And I really understand vaccine hesitancy and what I've told my friends and family who are hesitant to get the vaccine is stay down in my house.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's much, much higher. That's right. It means we actually now need a higher percentage of people who are immune in order to stop the spread of the delta variant.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know it's a shame that vaccinations have become so politicized because it's really just science. It's microbiology and math. The equation for her to immunity is 1 minus 1 over R naught. And the R not is how many people will one contagious person infect? So the R0 of the original COVID virus was somewhere between 2.5 and 3. The R0 of the Delta variant? Is somewhere between five and eight. That means one contagious person infects five or eight other people. So if the equation for herd immunity is 1 minus 1 over r0, what that means?”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what's frustrating to me when I was in government was that there was really a struggle to leverage the private sector in the response, meaning up to this point the response for public health was seen as government's role alone. That didn't work. It has to be a whole of society response. We have to have a place for individual citizen volunteers, for the private sector so that the whole society responds together instead of government trying to piecemeal it on their own.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make sure That's right. Operation Warp speed to develop a vaccine as fast as they did is a shining success. And there are many lessons learned from that where we can get even better and faster. I think the other success is the private sector. What we saw during COVID and what I certainly saw leading California in the testing task force is the private sector ran to the fight. They said our resources are at your fingertips. How can we help you? You know, you look at different companies, whether it's the pharmaceutical companies that develop the vaccine or the testing companies that quickly develop rapid tests, the private sector played an incredible role.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called Red Dawn. Right. Yeah. So, I think it was Richard Hatchet that nicknamed them the Wolverines after this Red Dawn movie. And that was the name of our email chain.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We did the vaccines were a shining success. You know, I think what Operation Warp speed accomplished and full disclosure, those guys are my friends. They're Wolverines. And so”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, my master's degree is in tropical medicine, which really is an antiquated term. The diseases that we formerly thought were tropical now thanks to globalization and to some degree global warming can move much faster. And so what we're seeing is that the pandemic pathogen spread has sped up. The risk is higher and those events are happening more and more frequently.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would start off by saying the COVID-19 containment effort did not happen. So that was a massive failure, but it didn't happen because the United States of America does not have a system's capability to contain a fast-moving novel pathogen that emerges simultaneously at multiple locations in the US.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, it was bonkers. And that's why the United States failed at containment. You know, once you lose your chance to contain the threat, then you get to choose between something horrible and something even more horrible. And that choice of massive outbreaks everywhere and bad health outcomes and the economy, I believe it's a false choice. If you put all your energy at containing the threat in the beginning. And without testing and without an operational infrastructure to contain COVID, the US had no shot. There was no effort to contain the pathogen in the beginning, which is why we're in the circumstance we are now”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, prioritizing them is really what drove people into the testing centers. And so in parallel to that, we set up over the course of two weeks, we stood up 80 testing centers across the state of California. Is a big state. And then, of course, revise the guidance for folks to get tested, started driving in people to those locations. And so that's how we scaled it up quickly.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, from a practical public health standpoint, the CDC's guidance was literally counterproductive to public health. And so looking at what we need to do, we have to test essential workers. Obviously, they're on the front lines. And so putting it in buckets that made more practical sense.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. That's what it should have been. The CDC's guidance was very restrictive at that time. You had to have symptoms. You had to be in certain risk categories. Exactly. And so.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much sooner than we thought we would. And so the supply part is you need to actually have the testing, you need to have testing locations throughout the state. And the demand part is you need people to show up and get tested. And so we broke it down into project management. We had task forces and work streams and we had daily stand-up meetings twice a day. It was 18 hours a day sprint, you know, for about 12 weeks. And the way that we managed it was just getting really tactical and operational. At one point, I rewrote California's guidance for who could be tested on a Friday night. And we published it on the website on a Sunday night. And it was far more aggressive than the CDC's guidance, but we needed people to show up to get tested. And the CDC's guidance was so restrictive, nobody could get tested.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I would say the outbreaks were invisible. Communities in California were burning up with COVID. It's just math and microbiology. I was whiteboarding it out at home on my whiteboard. I knew exactly how many cases I thought there were. The problem is we couldn't detect community spread without testing. And so Paul and I put together a plan essentially. I'd break it down in terms of supply and demand. We were doing 2,000 tests a day. Our objective was to get to 100,000 tests a day. We ended up blowing through that. We got to about 140,000 tests a day”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supply chain issues where everyone needed the same testing supplies. And so we were asked, Paul and I were asked to found and stand up the testing task force to fix testing for California.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was the greatest experience in rapid project management I've ever had. And I would be remiss if I didn't mention my amazing co-lead, which is Paul Markovich. He's the CEO and president of Blue Shield, California. And what happened is there was no testing in California or anywhere else. The state was only able to do about 2,000 PCR tests a day. And the backstory, as you know, is the CDC and FDA had said nobody could test. Wait for the CDC's test. So we waited. They rolled it out. It didn't work. They said, wait, we'll fix it. So we waited. They rolled it out again. It didn't work. And so the United States missed that critical two-month window of containment. Without testing, there's no way you can contain a threat because you can't find it. So by the time they opened the floodgates that any microbiology lab could test, the problem was the labs weren't doing it. And we had”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is hard. We can get to that later because I'll tell you why I'm so passionate about the private sector need for this and the mandate to show return on investment.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's always the challenge of public health because we succeed and then it's silent and you can't see that succeed in the data and statistics if you're not tracking outcomes. And traditionally, public health disease control does not have a good way to show return on investment.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How the adventure started. And I had always thought that that's where I wanted to end up was being state health officer because I thought I could have, you know, an incredible amount of impact there at that level. But California has 40 million people. And California is really like its own nation. It's so diverse. So it made me nervous moving from making risk based To doing that at the state on behalf of 40 million people. So it was a different comfort level.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While I was the local health officer in Santa Barbara over a number of different outbreaks, disasters, I was the health officer there during the Thomas Fire, which at the time was the largest fire in the history of California. It was a strange time of year. It was in December. And it was followed by a really powerful rainstorm that led to the Montecito mudslides. And as I was managing a number of different health risks around the mudslides, not just communicable disease, but a host of other things. I was in close communication with a state health officer, Karen Smith, who was my person to call. You know, when you're a local health officer and you need backup, you need a thought partner, you call the state. So Karen and I spend a lot of time on the phone. And shortly after that, she called me one day and said, what would you think about moving up to Sacramento to be my number two? And I said, yes.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's fascinating, right? I mean, public health disease control has shaped societies. It's shaped the world. And if you look at, you know, what's impacted societies and economies, it's been disease. And what's the biggest intervention public health has had? It's been vaccines. And today people tend to think it's something that is the underbelly of society that they don't have to worry about. Government's got that. If that risk ever arises, government will come and save us. But as local health officer, I figured out really quickly, no one's coming to save you. And yet you have this enormous responsibility. And if you're really good at your job, nobody knows. Because that means you've prevented it. You've stopped the outbreak.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a child, I was interested in the really awful gnarly hemorrhagic viruses that we see in Africa and interested in how they spread silently. And I loved bubonic plague. And I read about the Spanish flu of 1918 and cholera outbreaks and just a host of different diseases that have swept through societies. So when I went to college at age 17, I was pre-med and I majored in microbiology because that's where you learn about all those horrific diseases.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I learned that on the fly when I became the health officer for Santa Barbara County, the thing that intrigued me the most is called Layered Jurisdictional Authority. And what that means is the police powers to enforce communicable disease control in California sit with the local health officer. In some states, they sit with the state health officer, but in California it's with the local county public health officer, and the law actually says that they can take whatever measures are necessary to control the spread of disease. And that's an incredible amount of police power authority. And it's a huge responsibility. Really, it's the job of the local public health office across the United States to protect national security, health security, and now after COVID, we know even the outcome of the local economy is impacted by the”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will a public health officer is the local official for a county or a local jurisdiction who is responsible for ensuring that the public is safe against a host of different types of threats. My favorite threat, of course, is communicable disease control, but there's a number of things they do. They oversee restaurant inspections or water safety. I think the thing they're best known for, though, really is disease threats, because in the US, public health officers sprung up across the US in response to local needs. You know, if we rewind a hundred years, that might have been tuberculosis or smallpox or cholera, polio, etc. So today the local public health officers are largely unknown to the general public, but their role is really important.”
2021-07-30 · Masters in Business · Charity Dean on the Lessons of Covid-19 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source