Eric McDonald, a key part of San Diego's COVID response, retires
After nearly 15 years as a county medical director, most of them spent running San Diego County’s epidemiology and immunization services branch, Dr. Eric McDonald retired this month. From the very beginning, his work involved more than oversight of behind-the-scenes work tracking the progress of infectious diseases through the community. He also made occasional appearances in the spotlight, often backing up Dr. Wilma Wooten, San Diego County’s public health officer, before the news cameras on a surprisingly broad number of subjects.
While many will remember his calm demeanor explaining complicated topics during the county’s daily COVID-19 news conferences in 2020, he also helped explain the intricacies of the public health response to every type of outbreak from measles and hepatitis A to e-coli and the flu. Having joined the county in 2010 after a 24-year stint in emergency medicine with the U.S. Navy, a career that included two deployments to Iraq, McDonald immediately found himself handling the potential public health aspects of a situation that made national news. It was his job to assess the effects of the dark plume of smoke that would bloom into the sky when the Sheriff’s Department burnt down what everyone at the time had taken to calling the Escondido bomb factory, a rental home filled with the nation’s largest cache of homemade explosives ever discovered and deemed too volatile to move safely.
Learning that his time in Iraq had included responses to the after-effects of improvised explosive devices, Wooten, he said, decided he would head up the team tasked to make sure that the smoke billowing from the property was not toxic. “It just goes to show, you just never know what you’re going to end up working on in public health,” McDonald said.
The pandemic, though, was orders of magnitude larger than anything that had come before. Local public health agencies were tasked with reacting to an unfolding global threat in real time which, in San Diego, started with the local quarantine of American expatriates who had been living in China when the coronavirus outbreak began. Former county Supervisor Greg Cox was at the center of the small group of decision-makers during that early period and said that McDonald’s unflappability, honed in military situations, provided an undercurrent of calm that complimented Wooten’s organizational abilities. “His demeanor is very relaxed, he doesn’t come across as being arrogant or authoritarian, and he is able to convince people in a charming way that this is what we need to do, and this is why we need to do it,” Cox said.
And that opinion extends beyond the county. Dan Gross, retired former executive vice president of Sharp HealthCare, San Diego’s largest medical provider, recalled a time early in the pandemic response when several full cruise ships were docked in the harbor, needing to be disembarked. McDonald, Gross said, had little experience with the world of floating vacation entertainment but knew that Sharp ran a wide-reaching travel medicine program that often collaborated with Mexican authorities to treat cruise patients disembarked south of the border. Together, the health provider and the county worked out a plan to empty those ships and get passengers health care in local hospitals if needed. “He really doesn’t have an ego,” Gross said. “He didn’t put his own views out front, he made other people’s views a priority. “Some people refer to that as a servant leader, and that’s what he was for the county.”
Having just finished an interim assignment as director of the county Health and Human Services Department, McDonald says he and his spouse, Brian Yaw, intend to continue their long-term pursuit of live music, and not chamber music. Over the years, the couple has attended the Coachella music festival “probably 15 times.” Travel is also on the itinerary as is baseball. A Maryland native, an Orioles game is on the immediate to-do list. “In a week, I’m going back for my mom’s 95th birthday,” McDonald said. “We’re going to take her to an Orioles game. “It’s pure coincidence, but that weekend they’re playing the Padres.” Long term, he said, he plans to find ways to volunteer his skills to disadvantaged communities.
Before heading out, McDonald took a few moments to reflect on his time pursuing the public’s health in San Diego County:
Q: What was the hardest thing about the job?
A: Not having enough time. There are people in the community who have key information that you just don’t have time to hear sometimes until it’s later in the process, and one thing that I’ve learned is that keeping those lines of communication with the true community members is so important.
Q: Serving as a medical director in the public health world has its share of grim duties such as reviewing newly issued death certificates or interacting with the families of those who die due to infectious disease. How did you cope with these situations year in and year out?
A: I’m a glass-half-full kind of person so, even though it can be grim and emotionally taxing, on the other side, it’s a privilege to be able to take from something bad something that’s good and useful, you know, to help prevent those situations in the future.
Q: For many years you were among the first to know about new epidemiology cases and the results of public health interviews and contact tracing activities. Will you miss having a front-row seat to what is unfolding in the community?
A: Hopefully, it’s possible to stay in contact with the people who are still actively doing that work. I’ve told them, you know, I can always be one of your phone-a-friends. That was useful to me, and I hold out hope that I’ll still get some insights that way because I will miss it for sure.
Q: What was the toughest call you had to make?
A: During COVID, some of the decisions we had to make having to do with cruise ships were difficult. We had four ships in our port in the early part of the outbreak, and we had to find a way to take care of everyone on them without becoming the place where all the ships were going to come for the entire West Coast. At that time, there weren’t many ports that were letting the ships in, so we had to make some decisions that resulted in some ships actually not coming here and then going through the Panama Canal to Florida. We had to make some judgment calls that were protective of our medical system here and yet would have effects on the people on the ships.
Q: What do you make of the criticisms of the pandemic response that have increased in recent years? Some now say that government-ordered shutdowns did more harm than good.
A: It’s natural to look at businesses that closed and kids that didn’t get to go to their graduations — there are all of those things you can point to about COVID. But the problem is, you don’t know what the alternative actually was if we hadn’t done those things. I don’t know, a few more thousands of San Diegans might have died. People say, oh yeah, we should have just let that happen.’ Really? Not if it was your grandmother or your mother or your kid that was immune compromised because they were undergoing treatment for X, Y or Z. If you remember what happened in Italy and other places at the beginning of the outbreak, you can see how bad things got when medical systems became overwhelmed.
Q: Is there anything about doing this job in San Diego that you feel has been unique?
A: One of the things about San Diego that I’ve always loved is that we’re big enough that we have to deal with big problems, but we’re also sort of small enough that we’re able to see each other as a community, even across different boundaries, and that’s a benefit, maybe, of being a bi-national community, too. We’re able to look at some of these boundaries and go, well, that boundary is real, we have to deal with it, but in a lot of senses, it’s artificial. We have a spirit and an ability to do things in San Diego that a lot of other communities don’t. I really do think that, you know, it’s not six degrees of separation here, it’s like one or two.
author Paul Sisson