Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, a new PBS documentary series, "The Invisible Shield," reviews how the field of public health was instrumental in saving lives in the U.S.
"Invisible Shield is really about the fact that we don't see public health as saving our lives every day,” said Dr. Amy Acton, former director of the Ohio Department of Health. “It's a cross-sector, cross-discipline endeavor. But it's really humanity’s way of giving us the longevity in life that we now experience."
"The Invisible Shield" four-part documentary begins airing Tuesday, March 26 at 9 p.m. on WOSU TV. Watch a preview in the video player below.
As former Director of the Ohio Department of Health, Dr. Acton led the early efforts in 2020 to educate Ohioans on how to protect themselves from the deadly disease. She is featured in parts of the documentary where she discusses the actions taken during the early days of the pandemic.
"What do you do when there is no cure and there is no vaccine? You have a completely vulnerable population,” Acton said. “And that's what we did. Those Swiss cheese layers, those non-pharmaceutical interventions, which are things we've learned over hundreds of years, that actually helped us buy time and save a lot of lives until we really could do something about it."
Dr. Acton and other health experts eventually came under attack for policies that were enacted, such as mask-wearing and social distancing. Several central Ohioans protested outside of Dr. Acton’s home and threatened her life.
“Sadly, in public health, when you when you actually do well, when you knock it out of the park, you don't see what we prevented, and you start to see the risks of treatment or the risks of taking action as more than the actual, you know, deadliness of these diseases,” Dr. Acton said.
Dr. Acton said most people cooperated with the mask-wearing and social-distancing recommendations.
“We had to solve every problem in a way that we've never had to do before. As a country,” Dr. Acton said. “And to watch people row. Ohioans did flatten the curve in the beginning, just when we needed to, to buy that time to learn how to treat it, to keep, you know, people being able to go to the hospital if they had a heart attack, and there still being people there to take care of them. And that wasn't done by orders. That was done by the actions and behaviors of all of us.”
Dr. Acton said it is important to acknowledge that public health systems have helped increase life expectancies.
“The 25 years that we gained came from things that we can only solve collectively: clean food, safe water, sewage treatment, air, airplane safety, the list goes on and on,” Dr. Acton said. “It takes all of our sectors to do that, not just government. (It) takes all. All of us doing that together. And sadly, we're seeing our life expectancy go in the opposite direction.”
Dr. Acton is now in private practice in preventive medicine and public health. She stepped down as director of the Ohio Department of Health just months after the pandemic began. She then served for two months as chief health advisor to Gov. Mike DeWine before resigning from that role.
She said though she has no regrets for her high-profile role during the shutdown.
“It was the honor of a lifetime to serve in this way. I would do it a million times over,” Dr. Acton said.
