Crowd Response

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[ by Alexandra Sobczak ]

We’ve heard of contact tracing surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, but Priya Midha is actually doing it.

The Kent State University student was finishing her last semester toward earning a Master of Science in clinical epidemiology when the coronavirus hit. 

Now, she’s making a difference in the pandemic — by tracing coronavirus cases in Northeast Ohio.

An opportunity that she found through Kent State, the Lake County General Health District job tasks her with notifying known contacts of a person who tested positive for coronavirus, entering data into the Ohio contact-tracing system and letting people know that they have to quarantine for 14 days.

“I’m sitting at home seeing some of my friends who are in the field of medicine out on the front lines working every day to help people,” says Midha. “I jumped at the opportunity, and it’s been a gratifying and humbling experience to feel like I am making a difference.”

Through hands-on experience and classes, students like Midha learn about public health issues and informing the community about important findings. She and others take us inside the field that is at the forefront of this pandemic. 

Lab Study

Kent State’s public health program stands out — it is one of only two colleges of public health accredited by the Association For Schools and Programs of Public Health in Ohio, the other being Ohio State University. 

There are 15 undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees currently offered at Kent State. Midha is now working toward a Ph.D. in epidemiology at Kent State, pursuing either a teaching or research career. Although not on the medical track, classes focus heavily on math, science and health.

“The field of epidemiology itself is the study of the distribution and control of diseases,” she says. “There’s a lot of different mathematical models, a lot of biostatistics, a lot of knowledge of basic biological sciences, knowledge of chronic diseases, infectious diseases. A lot of my classes were geared toward those subject areas.”

Kent State aims to provide students with skills such as researching, creating strategies to limit disparities, conducting studies to predict trends and understanding legal and ethical issues of health care administration. Students learn from professors who research on a wide range of topics, including bio-preparedness, policy analysis, health disparities, chronic disease, HIV/AIDS, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and infectious diseases.

Having professors who are experts in so many different areas helps students connect with them and find their niche, says Christine Fishman, who graduated from Kent State in May with a Master of Public Health in health policy and management and took classes such as Social Determinants of Health and Finance in Health Care.

While Kent State has conferred over 1,800 public health degrees since that college began in 2009, other schools are just getting started.

After about a year of planning, Walsh University is offering a public health major to students for the first time this fall within the School of Behavioral and Health Sciences.

“It’s very versatile,” says Michael Dunphy, the vice president of academic affairs at Walsh University. “We were in the process of designing the curriculum … and coincidentally, COVID hit. There’s been a lot of student demand already.”

Before, science students took classes that were connected to public health and then would go on to earn a master’s degree in public health. Now, there is a more straightforward path for students. The program aims to prepare students for careers — including medical and health services managers and substance abuse, behavioral disorder and mental health counselors — that have the most growth potential, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Walsh public health students take classes in business, sociology, psychology, basic sciences and public health topics such as policy and data. 

“You want them to graduate and be very aware of not only the basic sciences and basic social sciences but how you apply this in the real world, both in public policy and private health care,” Dunphy says.

The program aims to improve students’ skills in areas including communication, writing, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention databases, current events, economics and government. Students also get hands-on experience through internships.

Even after operating for 10 years, the Kent State program remains timely. Over the summer, there was an online course offered to graduate students that focused on pandemics. 

“The summer course focused on ... understanding COVID-19 in particular,” says Jeffrey Hallam, the associate dean of the College of Public Health at Kent State. “Tara Smith [taught it], who’s an internationally known infectious disease expert.”

This semester, there is a new course offered to both undergraduate and graduate students addressing the broader idea of how public health as a profession responds to both COVID-19 and pandemics in general. 

Global Health

As we’ve learned with the coronavirus pandemic, public health affects people on a local, national and global level. So Kent State’s program connects students with fieldwork in health departments in Northeast Ohio, Cincinnati and Franklin County both before and after graduation, and it also has international partnerships.

“We’ve got somewhere between 400 and 500 public health agencies that we work with in Ohio, across the country, Puerto Rico, Australia, South America,” Hallam says. “If the students choose to go global, they could certainly do that. If they wanna go right down the street, they can do that.”

Graduate students complete a practicum, which requires up to 300 hours of fieldwork. Fishman’s practicum was at MetroHealth’s Office of Opioid Safety, and during it, she helped write a proposal that led to the launch of a syringe exchange program out of an RV. The program became especially useful once the coronavirus pandemic hit and restrictions on medical visits began.

Through Kent State, she later got connected with a contact-tracing job at Lake County General Health District — same as Midha. 

Midha and Fishman monitor people for symptoms during quarantine, and if someone develops them, they report it to epidemiologists at the Ohio Health Department. “Our purpose is to trace and track as many people as we can who may have been exposed to the virus so that we can get things under control,” Midha says.

It allows them to have hands-on experience distributing information to the community and communicating with people. “I’m learning how to … meet them where they are,” Fishman says. “It’s teaching me that we all need to feel safe.”

These education programs turn students into experts who will one day be leading the fight against a pandemic and helping the community understand that public health is essential. As Midha explains it, public health has influenced environmental health, food safety, physician guidelines, safety precautions and more, and it’s our way forward. 

“A lot of people who are not in the field of public health are only understanding its importance now,” she says. “I’ve had a lot of people tell me Now, your field is so important. It’s always been important. I hope that momentum keeps going.”