As Douglas County’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has consumed much attention, it’s also been an opportunity for the community to see the work and hear from those who often aren’t in the public spotlight.
Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health’s Senior Analysts Dee Vernberg and Aihua Zhu have had their hands in many facets of the community’s response.
“We’ve been working behind the scenes to monitor the pandemic and to produce information to help organizations and people in the community be more prepared,” said Aihua, who started her position in late January.
As the Douglas County planning and response ramped up in March, it became imperative to know our potential peak of cases to help plan for staffing and bed space at LMH Health.
Dee and Aihua were the number crunchers examining different model projections based on how the pandemic affected other places and worked for days with Director of Community Health Beth Llewellyn and leadership at LMH Health under the broader umbrella of Douglas County’s Unified Command response. They gathered data to produce actionable information to aid in decision making – a key function of an informatics department in public health, Dee said.
It allowed the hospital to make staffing and planning decisions, and it also reinforced the importance of messaging to the community about mitigation efforts,
“We all want life to go back to normal. We want our economy to be booming, but in order to do that, we need to ensure that we are a healthy community,” Dee said.
Dee and Aihua have also driven an online community survey on COVID-19 symptoms and other information about the pandemic that through the first two waves drew 20,000 responses from Douglas County residents.