COVID-19 was like a storm out of the blue, upending everything.
Even for Judy Kruger (BSc ’93, Health Studies), who is used to dealing with disease outbreaks in her role at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, navigating it has been a learning curve.
Kruger, a senior advisor and deputy branch chief at the CDC, says one of the first things she did, besides reading everything she could in the scientific literature to gain insight into the rapidly evolving pandemic, was to crack open some books about past pandemics.
“I immediately started reading well-researched historical books like “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History” by John Barry, which discussed the government response to an epidemic during the 1918 influenza pandemic,” she says. “I also found the book “Quarantine!” by Howard Markel informative as it depicted how medical knowledge and public health measures were put in place in New York City in 1892.”
With that, plus her previous experience with disease outbreaks, Kruger was helping the CDC chart a course.
Kruger serves in a management role in the Evaluation and Analysis Branch, Division of State and Local Readiness, Center for Preparedness and Response (CPR) at CDC. She joined the CDC in 2001 as an epidemic intelligence service officer with the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. In this role, she worked as a chronic disease epidemiologist on cross-cutting risk factors, in addition to serving on the front lines of public health, trying to figure out the source and details of any epidemic in order to find a cure or put a stop to it.
Over the years, she gained a lot of experience during federal response and recovery missions for disease outbreaks, such as the ones involving Anthrax, West Nile, Ebola, Zika and polio.
In the early spring of 2020, Kruger pivoted quickly to focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.
She was initially deployed to assist health departments that were setting up contact tracing efforts. “I was sent on behalf of the Health Department Task Force for up to 30 days at a time to support mass case investigation surveillance and implement contact tracing efforts,” Kruger said.
Contact tracing provides health departments with information about where the virus is spreading and helps ensure that people who have been exposed are being tested. It is a critical piece of the effort to tamp down the rate of transmission. Kruger was helping the health departments get their people in the field up to speed in implementing contact tracing.
More recently, she served on the COVID-19 response international task force mitigation team as strategic information unit lead. This work involved assessing different levels of government mitigation policies from 185 countries, including measures such as travel, movement and mass gathering restrictions, academic closures, passenger screening, traveler isolation, quarantines, office and business closures.
That project resulted in user-friendly visualizations developed by the CDC team to show trends and inform national decision-making about mitigation and when to lift the measures.
Healthy and safe behaviours
Kruger’s previous roles included research into promoting healthy and safe behaviours. Early in her career, for example, she did research into smoking in school-age children, and that enabled her to obtain leadership positions related to smoking and health in the CDC.
She credits her undergraduate experiences in the University of Waterloo Health Studies program for sparking her fascination with health and lifestyle behaviours of people, an interest that opened the window into the world of CDC and international health.
“I was attracted to the mission of the CDC, which is to save lives and protect people from health threats,” she says. “It also guards against international disease transmission, with personnel stationed in more than 60 countries. During the past year, the CDC staff has been working 24/7 to achieve its mission, by putting science into action.”
By January, vaccination programs in the U.S. had begun to roll out, starting with front-line health care workers, elderly people in long term care facilities and other vulnerable populations. With the election of American President Joe Biden and the recent appointment of Rochelle Walensky, the new director of the CDC, Kruger is hopeful this pandemic storm will subside.
“I look forward to the next couple months as we take steps toward ending the COVID-19 pandemic,” she says.
