Douglas County in Colorado is moving out of its tri-county public health partnership with other local counties after residents opposed mask mandates. Instead, it will create its own health department and has contracted a private company to provide COVID-19-related public health guidance in a contract reportedly worth $1.5 million.
Similarly, West Covina, Calif., has voted to end its partnership with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health because of disagreements over the department’s “one-size-fits-all” COVID-19 restrictions. It, too, plans on contracting a private company to provide consultation on public health measures, although the company it has chosen for some services seems to deal mostly with city engineering, according to KHN.
Public health departments deal with everything from sanitation to federal food assistance programs, and axing partnerships over COVID-19 restriction disagreements is unfortunate, Jeffrey Levi, PhD, a professor of health policy and management at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., told KHN.
“You are losing access to just a wide, wide range of both expertise and services that will never be replicable at the local level. Never. The public will be hurt in ways that are not instantly measurable,” he told KHN.
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