FDL County Public Health Officer Reflects on One Year of the Pandemic

Thursday marked one year since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and local leaders are taking some time to reflect on the past year and what they and their departments learned over the past 365 days.

For the Fond du Lac County Health Department, the challenges started almost instantly – with the first two confirmed cases of the virus being reported March 11^th of last year, and case numbers increasing rapidly from there.

Fond du Lac County Public Health Officer Kim Mueller explains that one of the major challenges from early on was with the virus being so new, that there may have been a delay in getting information from the state – which in turn delayed its release to the public.

“If I’m not getting it from the state, and I’m not able to portray that to the public, the public is going to get it somewhere else,” Mueller said. “Then the information may not be correct – the message may not come out correct – so I think the best thing we can learn is that we need to be credible, and we need to be quick – we need to be first, we need to be fast.”

Mueller says that she and her staff have tried to view the last year of the pandemic as an opportunity to learn and grow.

Click to listen to the full interview with Kim Mueller from Thursday’s Fond du Lac Today