The U.S. declared COVID-19 a national pandemic on March 13, 2020.
(Lauren Chapman/IPB News)
It’s been five years since the White House declared COVID-19 a national health emergency.
In 2020, Graham McKeen was Indiana University’s assistant director of public and environmental health. He spoke with WFIU/WTIU News to reflect on what he learned, and what pieces researchers are still missing.
McKeen said he contracted COVID twice in less than two months. One of the times, he went to the emergency department.
“It just killed my brain,” McKeen said. “Like, I couldn't think. I couldn't speak correctly. I wasn't thinking coherently for 10 months, you know? I never want to experience that again.”
McKeen speaks with WFIU/WTIU News in August 2024 about COVID vaccines. (FILE PHOTO: Isabella Vesperini)
The CDC describes long COVID as symptoms that persist at least three months after exposure. McKeen said it’s difficult to define.
“I mean, we're talking about over 200 different symptoms, and this virus can do and go anywhere in the body and basically do anything,” McKeen said. “And I think a lot of people with long COVID probably don't even know they have it.”
On March 13, 2020, there were just 12 confirmed COVID cases and no deaths in Indiana. By the end of the year, there were over 500,000 cases and 7,700 deaths.
McKeen had COVID on his radar at the end of 2019.
He said while he was at IU, COVID was all he was able to focus on.
“So we do a lot of hazardous waste stuff at IU — we have soil, water, air permitting, things like that — I never really got to do or start that job,” he said. “I vividly remember January 6, coming back into the office and my coworker standing in the doorway, ‘Hey, did you hear about that virus in China?’”
He said at the time, he had just as many answers as federal health organizations did.
“Historically, working in public health, we always had this thought that, like, the federal agencies are there,” McKeen said. “They're going to step up. They're going to give us this guidance. They're going to come out and, you know, tell us what to do. And that seemed to be slow and missing or not coming out in a timely manner.”
He also said people didn’t care soon enough.
“Everything was up in the air,” McKeen said. “I felt like I had to go to a mountain top, you know, and shake a tree and yell, because a lot of people, I think, were distracted.”
Takeaways for future virus outbreaks
A big factor of containing an illness is how much funding is available for medical prevention and intervention, McKeen said. The state used to distribute $7 million dollars among Indiana’s counties. Initiatives like Health First Indiana increased that funding to $75 million on July 1, 2023, then $150 million in July 2024.
“We are almost at the national average for funding for public health, which we should still be happy and celebrate, and the fact that we were able to pass that legislation in that state house at that time is still a minor miracle to me,” McKeen said.
“That is not the way to go about this,” he said. “It's really scary what's happening at the federal level, because that's impacting state and local governmental public health as well.”
He said health organizations should treat bird flu with the potential to have the same lasting power that COVID did, if it spread to humans.
“Is it a massive current risk to human-to-human spread of that bird flu? No,” McKeen said. “But could it be in a couple months? Certainly. And so we should be preparing for that.”
