PIEN HUANG, HOST:
Are you one of the millions of people who have gone to a fan zone or stadium or bar to watch World Cup soccer? Well, at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., there's a small team of public health experts who are watching you, collectively. It's an effort outside of government working to fill in for gaps that have opened up in public health since the Trump administration pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, cut funding and pushed out thousands of workers from the federal workforce. Katelyn Jetelina is a Texas-based epidemiologist working on the new effort called the Health Security Operations Center. She's collecting population-level data based on people's thoughts and experiences.
KATELYN JETELINA: And this includes about - a survey to about 2,500 people that are actually going to the World Cup game, so we can hear from them, as well as people within a 30-mile radius of the stadiums.
HUANG: Amy Lockwood is really into wastewater. She analyzes data from waste for the company Verily.
AMY LOCKWOOD: A lot of the information that we're finding is coming from wastewater surveillance, and pretty much any pathogen you can think of we can find in wastewater.
HUANG: Jetelina says the data comes together in ways that are helpful to health officials.
JETELINA: People were chatting on reddit around a nasty stomach bug in Washington. And when we looked deeper into the epidemiological data, there sure was a big wastewater signal there. And so we were able to inform the state of Washington for their operations as well as their communications.
HUANG: The information on what diseases and health threats are circulating where gets shared in situation reports sent to a thousand professionals who work in public health, healthcare and emergency management on daily calls like this.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Good afternoon. Our bottom line up front, overall health risk at World Cup games and base camps remains low.
HUANG: These situation reports inform how doctors like Ethan Booker, an emergency room physician at MedStar Health in Washington, D.C., practice during the World Cup.
ETHAN BOOKER: When I know something's circulating nearby, it changes my index of suspicion. It means before any lab results come back or before I even order them, am I wearing a mask when I walk in the room? Am I wearing a mask for my whole shift? Can this patient with a cough go back out into the waiting room to wait for the rest of the tests?
HUANG: It's a major effort, and it's run out of a repurposed lab space on the Georgetown Medical School campus. Rebecca Katz is the director, and she takes me on a tour.
REBECCA KATZ: It's a microbiology lab. At the end of the room is the ancient chemical hood, and we've got a screen in front of it that's showing one of the games. Right now we're looking at Argentina versus Algeria.
HUANG: The game is on silently in the background. The walls are covered in World Cup posters. More than a dozen people pack the lab benches all in a row, staring at large monitors with data streams on measles, wastewater and weather patterns that they're scraping from public and corporate sources. Katz says it's so quiet because they're on deadline.
KATZ: It is 11:40 in Boston, New York, Philly, Atlanta, Miami and Toronto. We will do our first stand-up call of the day at 1:30. The sit rep goes out by 2:00. It's the first push of the morning to be able to get the information into the sit rep for the day.
HUANG: Dr. Nii Hanson-Nortey is a doctoral student and epidemiologist. He's checking the situation in Canada, which, along with the U.S. and Mexico, is hosting World Cup teams and games.
NII HANSON-NORTEY: Well, so far, in Canada, the high-risk viruses are on the low, especially around the match venues. So we're looking out for that.
HUANG: It's a scrappy operation, and Katz says that she's borrowing equipment, getting access to data from collaborators and using research funds to make it work. The idea came together last fall when she and her colleagues realized that official efforts to prepare for the World Cup weren't what they expected.
How did the idea for this start? Why are you doing it?
KATZ: So I think there's a lot of reasons. Mass gatherings are always events where we are worried about infectious disease spread. This particular mass gathering is particularly complicated, given the three countries, the 48-plus jurisdictions. So even in the best of times, there would probably be a need for external groups to be able to work side by side with public health authorities.
We're in complicated times. We are also trying to help support local, state and federal workforce that is pretty stretched right now and realized that there was an opportunity for us to do that. And also, you know, we're in a new era of public health where there's a lot of different actors, including private sector - and so trying to figure out how civil society really works closely with government authorities. So in a lot of ways, we're testing something out here.
HUANG: You also said that we are in a new era of public health, that there's a lot more private partnerships that are involved. Tell me about this new era. How do you characterize it? What is it in response to? And do you think it's kind of like a permanent new space that we're developing right now?
KATZ: There's a lot of unknowns. Resource allocation to public health has been dramatically changed and in uneven ways, right? There are some jurisdictions and there's some programs that are extremely well-funded. There are some that are not. There are some surveillance programs that have had to be completely ended because of lack of resources. And it's left a smaller workforce that is being pulled in a lot of different directions.
And there is a kind of philosophical shift right now that is trying to push some of the activities that have traditionally been done by the public sector into the private sector. This is going to take a while to figure out how we do that and how we do that well. I have no idea what the future holds, right? Ten years from now, there may be an explosion in funding for local public health. Wouldn't that be amazing? But right now, what we're chewing is we're trying to figure out what the new normal is, and it's a little bit of trial and error.
HUANG: That was Rebecca Katz from Georgetown University telling me why they launched the Health Security Operations Center for the World Cup.
(SOUNDBITE OF DOSS' "SOFTPRETTY") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
