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More than two years after the outbreak of COVID ravaged the medical profession, the Brownwood/Brown County Health Department has begun adjusting to the new norm. For the health department’s Public Health Preparedness Coordinator and Epidemiologist Cliff Karnes, approaching his 10th anniversary in his position, it was the most trying moments of his career.
“It has been more than I ever expected,” Karnes, 36, said regarding COVID. “We’ve planned and exercised for things that would require mass vaccination, mass prophylaxis antibiotic treatment, but never did we anticipate it going for as long as it’s gone. When it started off it was a novel disease and we didn’t have the therapeutics up front, so it was mostly testing – detect the disease, box it in, don’t let it out, then the virus would die off and we wouldn’t spread it, theoretically. But that’s not how it occurred.”
In Karnes’ role, preparing for events such as COVID come with the territory. But the reality of the severity of the outbreak, which still lingers, far exceeded plans to combat the illness.
“Going from preparing for an event to having an event was much different,” Karnes said. “When I started here in 2013, Ebola was in our region and we participated in the response, but our response wasn’t boots on the ground. We watched from afar, we didn’t collect specimens, isolate and quarantine. We practiced for those things, we just never put it into practice until COVID.”
The main components to Karnes’ position are formulating emergency plans for the county as well as educating the public and providing documentation.
“For the preparedness side we write the health and medical annex to the emergency management plan for the county and update the annex,” Karnes said. “We plan with local clinics, local healthcare facilities, and the hospital as part of the health component. The drive-through pods back when COVID hit, we were planning for those.
“On the epidemiology side is the notifiable disease reporting. We try to implement control measures, provide education to the case, answer their questions on how to prevent it from spreading, and pinpoint the location of where they acquired the illness. We investigate where potential infections are from, and we try and stop it from spreading to somewhere else.”
With initial career plans of becoming a social studies teacher, to later taking a position of employment at the Brown County Jail, Karnes’ path to the Brownwood/Brown County Health Department wasn’t the road he expected to travel. Still, he found a similar calling to what originally led him to wanting to be a teacher.
“When I saw this position open, it has the same kind of foundation that public education has so I took it not thinking I would be here now for 10 years, especially through COVID,” Karnes said. “When I think about the individuals we helped, the mission of the health department in public service is certainly one of the greatest attributes of working here. Early on in COVID we would do daily monitoring of cases. Several individuals didn’t have family or friends to check on them. We’d facilitate pursing more advanced medical treatment for some of those who could have faced potentially detrimental outcomes.”
The Public Health Emergency Preparedness program is marking its 20th anniversary as it was designed in response to the Anthrax threats of 2002. Fifteen years after the program was created, in 2017, Karnes attained his master’s degree in public administration with a concentration on disaster and emergency management.
Formerly far more active in the community, Karnes had to step away from several of his voluntary roles due to the workload COVID created.
“I served on the Salvation Army Community Advisory Board until September of last year because I couldn’t give it what it deserves,” Karnes said. “My wife and I attend Brownwood Evangelism Center where we’ve gone our whole life. We were children’s ministries directors at the beginning of COVID and resigned the positions due to the demands of COVID.”
With the medical profession having a better grasp on COVID, Karnes looks forward to more actively assisting the community outside of his work role once again.
“I’m exploring opportunities now that we may be seeing an end to this pandemic in site,” Karnes said.
Karnes and his wife Shauna will celebrate their 15th wedding anniversary in October, and their son Jackson will turn 14 in November.