Local podcaster Daniella Barreto called her latest project to capture her frustration with how leaders handled the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It seemed like all of these things we’re taught in school, like prevention being key and using evidence to make decisions, was thrown out the window,” Barreto told The Tyee. “Mask mandates were being taken away, people were increasingly getting long COVID, and I decided I needed to do something because people were not getting the information they needed.”
Launching the podcast in November 2024, Barreto used her background in public health, with a master of science in population public health from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor of science in health science from Simon Fraser University, to help explain what went wrong. So far she’s released five episodes and has many more in the works.
When public health is working well, it’s invisible, she said. It’s a bad thing that it’s been so visible lately.
People are still getting sick with COVID, there’s the biggest measles outbreak North America has seen in generations, the looming threat of a new bird flu pandemic and politicians refusing to follow clinical guidelines for addiction care.
South of the border there’s a U.S. health secretary gutting long-standing public health institutions and proposing to let bird flu rip.
It seemed like a good time for The Tyee to ask Barreto if she thought her podcast title would be so prophetic. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: So is public health dead?
Daniella Barreto: Public health needs an overhaul. It hasn’t been working for many people, and this moment shows public health is vulnerable to damage or being dismantled.
I hope this is an opportunity to overhaul it, keep the pieces that were working and have leaders who are able to make decisions in the public interest. Otherwise things look quite bleak.
Why focus on B.C.?
I’ve lived in B.C. for more than 20 years and there’s so many positive examples of good public health here.
It’s a leader in HIV prevention and treatment.
There’s the Orpheum theatre in Vancouver, which has a sophisticated ventilation system that works to mitigate airborne disease transmission.
I also just finished interviewing Dr. Lyne Filiatrault [a retired emergency physician who worked at Vancouver General Hospital], who was instrumental in VGH avoiding the kind of SARS outbreak we saw in Toronto.
Is mistrust in public health all COVID’s fault?
There were cracks and problems before, like hospital overcrowding and the needs of marginalized communities not being met. COVID exacerbated it all.
The distrust is coming from really poor communication and lack of foresight. Airborne transmission, at this point, is undeniable.
But public health leaders, especially provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, focus on hand washing. That doesn’t interrupt how diseases are spread in the air. So people are confused.
Does Henry ending mask mandates in health-care settings concern you?
Yes. I would love for Henry to explain how she decided removing mask protections in hospitals is the best plan. I think the reasoning is that infection spread and respiratory disease transmission is lower, but lower doesn’t mean gone.
We know COVID is not a seasonal virus and there are often increases in the spring and summer.
There’s also the threat of H5N1 and measles outbreaks.
Masking is preventive, so now would be a good time to keep and improve masks in hospitals.
The flimsy, gappy, blue [surgical] masks are splash guards. They’re like wearing flip-flops to a construction site. We have Canadian manufacturers who make better N95 and KN95s that could be distributed in hospitals to lower the risk of transmission even more.
Mask mandates are an easy, relatively cheap intervention that would pay us back by breaking those chains of transmission, keeping health-care workers safe and helping manage the strain on the system.
When Henry ended the mask mandate she also encouraged people to get the spring dose of the COVID vaccine because cases tend to surge in the spring and summer.
There’s these things that just kind of boggle the mind. Like, how are public health leaders telling us these things in the same sentence?
Of course, vaccinations are important. But we also know that protection wanes, and if we’re not doing anything else to mitigate transmission, the virus has so many chances to mutate and become a new strain so we’re always going to be behind with vaccinations. Masking would interrupt and slow that down.
What else would slow it down?
Masking and cleaning the air. There are HEPA filters and Corsi-Rosenthal boxes. Ventilation, too, which is really easy because you just open a window.
In one episode I talked to Dr. Allen Haddrell, who is also from B.C. and works as an aerosol scientist at the University of Bristol in the U.K. He says the lower the amount of CO2 in a room, the harder it is for COVID to infect people. So even opening a window and lowering the CO2 in a room helps.
Measles is a disease where a free, readily available vaccine with a proven safety record can prevent someone from ever getting sick. And yet we’re seeing measles outbreaks. How could public health improve its messaging around vaccines?
There’s all kinds of challenges, especially given how anti-vax misinformation has begun to make people question vaccination.
We need stories of how vaccines work, not just “They work, end of story.”
Public health contributed to this problem by pushing a vaccine-only strategy for COVID. They said all we needed to do was get vaccinated. People are seeing that didn’t really work in the way they were hoping it would. That strategy undermined public health messaging around vaccination.
I don’t think people understand that vaccines work differently for different viruses or pathogens. There needs to be more storytelling to respond to that.
Have you been paying attention to H5N1, or bird flu, cases?
It concerns me because it seems to be so widespread. Migrant workers on U.S. dairy farms don’t necessarily have papers and might not seek care if they get sick because they’re afraid of the extreme anti-immigrant, anti-migrant rhetoric.
The more exposed people are, the more opportunities the virus has to jump to human cells, which could lead to human-to-human transmission.
The B.C. teenager who caught bird flu needed a really high level of care. If we had an outbreak I don’t think we’d be able to do that for everyone, and that would be very difficult for the medical system.
Dr. Filiatrault is concerned about emergency rooms where people wait for hours with no masks. If someone is sick, that could be 10-plus hours of breathing in the same space as other people. That’s exactly how epidemics start.
In any public health issue the people most impacted are Black people, Indigenous people and anyone who is at an intersection of systemic oppression.
For long COVID, Statistics Canada said the more we get COVID, the more likely we are to have long-lasting symptoms. This disproportionately impacts Black people because of the systemic forces that mean Black people are more often working face-to-face and low-paying jobs where you don’t get access to sick days.
Scariest question for last: Let’s talk about the health-care cuts happening in the U.S. I’ve heard the cuts summarized as an attempt by the administration to hide how its policies are impacting or killing queer and BIPOC communities. Do you think these cuts are targeted, or just a sledgehammer to public health in general?
I’d say if you wanted to kill a lot of people, this is how you’d do it. I guess there’s some plausible deniability because it’s torching everything. But we know HIV programs for prevention and treatment have been severely affected. We know certain populations like queer and trans people have high rates of HIV and need access to treatment and prevention. And we know this administration has been explicit about its anti-trans and anti-queer beliefs.
One thing that stood out to me in the Wired article about the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] cuts was the elimination of the air quality, asthma and environmental hazards branches. That has incredible impacts on Black populations and communities of colour in the United States because of environmental racism. We know those communities are exposed to the things those branches try to mitigate. If they’re gone, those populations are going to be affected more. This is devastating for everyone.
These U.S. decisions will have global impacts, like populations around the world that rely on U.S. funding for HIV treatment and tuberculosis treatment. There will be a lot of death. Public health is connected to everything, so attack it and you will feel the impacts in all sectors.
