134. Dr. Amy Acton on Loss, Learning, and Finding Meaning in the Pandemic

About this episode

Dr. Amy Acton reflects on the lessons learned from Ohio's pandemic response and the importance of hope amidst challenges.

Despite the immense loss and often nasty politics that set in a few months into Ohio’s pandemic response, former Director of the Ohio Department of Health, Dr. Amy Acton insists that there was far more love than hate in those early months. Despite the challenges we face, she wants Ohioans to reflect on how much they accomplished together and think about what the means for the state moving forward. On Episode 134 of Prognosis Ohio, more than three years after she stepped down after leading Ohio’s COVID-19 response in 2020, Acton joins Prognosis Ohio to talk with Dan Skinner about what perspective and insight a few years of processing the experience have given her. Topics in the state of public health preparedness in Ohio, and what Ohio needs to do to start not only learning important lessons from our state’s collective experience with COVID, but to grieve. Acton also talks poignantly about the state of our democratic systems and the relationship between the malignant forces that stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and the divisiveness and threats of violence that set in in Ohio in response to public health measures. Through all of this, Acton offers a number of reasons to have some…

People in this episode

Host: Dan Skinner

Guest: Dr Amy Acton

Topics covered

• loss
• learning
• meaning
• pandemic
• public health
• democracy
• Ohio

Keywords

• COVID-19
• public health preparedness
• grief
• democratic systems
• Ohio Under COVID

Mentioned in this episode

Products: Health, Hope, and Healing, Ohio Under COVID

Books & works: Health, Hope, and Healing, Ohio Under COVID, Afterword, The Public Health Crisis Survival Guide

Places: Ohio, Chillicothe

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