By Nina Huang
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Dr. Eric Chow
Dr. Eric Chow’s parents didn’t think he’d like medicine and he took that to heart and trusted their advice. However, after exploring alternate pathways, including an internship at the Institute of Medicine in D.C., he ultimately decided med school was the path for him.
Because of his upbringing and love for foreign languages, Chief of Communicable Disease Epidemiology for Public Health—Seattle & King County, Chow, originally thought he wanted to be an interpreter. But what he truly valued was a career in public health. He appreciated the conversations with his advisors and having the perspective of being a clinician and caring for patients.
“What attracted me to medicine was the intellectual component. There’s a hands-on piece, such as a surgeon healing someone, and then there’s also the thoughtful specialist like internal medicine and pediatrics, thinking through an issue, that’s more of my style—the intersection of that was where I wanted to sit,” he explained.
Within infectious disease, there are respiratory viruses, influenza, clinical aspects, and so much more to learn about infections.
Both of Chow’s parents are pharmacists by training. His mom was born and raised in Hong Kong and his dad was born and raised in Mississippi with roots in Toisan, China.
Chow received his BA in international relations and a BS in biology from Stanford University. He also stayed at Stanford for another year to complete his master’s in biology.
He found passion after pivoting from providing clinical care to studying more public health as an infectious disease doctor.
“One pathway to this work was through the Center for Disease Control (CDC)’s Epidemic Intelligence Service program, where I spent two years with the CDC learning what it’s like to do field epidemiology, learning about infectious diseases, the interplay of microorganisms and society—how it impacts our choices and the things we do,” he said.
Chow worked at the CDC from 2018 to 2020. In fact, Chow was part of the initial CDC group that flew out to Seattle at the end of February 2020 when they were notified that someone had died at a Kirkland long-term care facility without a diagnosis. At the time, there were lots of restrictions and ultimately that person tested positive for COVID-19 and the team realized an outbreak was occurring.
Chow considered himself lucky because his supervisor in the program provided him with a breadth of training and experiences that allowed him to be very nimble and flexible for whatever disease process came their way.
In the role since July 2022, Chow has a very important job, to say the least.
Not only is he focused on transitioning his team to a new period where public health funding has decreased while continuing to address COVID-19, along with other public health threats, but he’s also trying to maintain morale for a team that’s experienced a lot of burn out due to the pandemic. He’s working on figuring out a pathway forward to continue addressing public health challenges, but also help his team maintain work-life balance.
His team comprises, but is not limited to, public health nurses, disease investigators, administrators, epidemiologists, analysts, and support staff—all who contribute to disease investigations.
At the same time, he continues to re-emphasize to people that public health has chronically been underfunded, but the Public Health King County has managed to retain and recruit passionate and resilient people.
Though the emergency is “over,” Chow and his team will be working to transition to continue promoting public health education and awareness.
“We have to right size our approaches and focus on severe diseases for communities at the highest risk and communities with access to care,” he said.
The U.S. government declared a public health emergency at the beginning of the pandemic and measures were put in place to rapidly upscale response activity to address COVID-19 in the community. In addition to mitigating the spread, more healthcare options were made available and along with that came some funding to support low financial barrier access to COVID-19 medical countermeasures such as vaccines, testing, etc.
But now that the emergency has ended, Chow shared that there are data reporting requirement changes and expects that insurance companies’ coverage to distribution would also end.
Despite the end of the emergency phase, Chow stressed that it doesn’t mean the pandemic is over. The number of hospitalizations and deaths have decreased, but hospitalization deaths still occur, and are impacting those who are at highest risk, including older folks and those with underlying conditions.
“There are still a lot of things for us to learn. There are a lot of things that are unknown about who might be at risk for this. People still might develop long COVID or post-COVID conditions. We don’t fully understand or appreciate that yet,” he said.
“We’ve learned a lot of lessons during the COVID-19 pandemic. Those lessons remain very critical moving forward despite what stage or phase we’re in. It’s a multilayered approach—stay up to date on vaccines, mask up in indoor spaces, particularly when they’re not in well-ventilated or crowded spaces,” he added.
While there is no official mandate to wear masks anymore, Chow chooses to wear one in order to protect his family and friends, including his eight-month-old and older parents.
“When I was growing up, my parents imparted on me core principles to live by. This is true for many Asian families out there. Work hard in school and find your passion while keeping family in mind when making key decisions in life. Choices and actions can frequently impact and have consequences on other people—that has really instilled empathy and compassion for other people,” Chow shared.
“When I choose to protect myself, I am also protecting other people. We’ve learned a lot about what keeps us safe and we should use these guiding principles and integrate them into our daily lives,” he said.
“We have a lot of great people that we work with that contribute to various components of the public health department. In our team-minded approach to balance all the priorities we’re faced with, this is a group that’s highly skilled and passionate. I want to do whatever we can to maintain and build upon that work we’ve achieved during the pandemic,” he said.
Another priority for Chow and his team is addressing racism as a public health crisis.
“How do we integrate all those lessons learned and integrate them into all public health activities? Being able to build those community partnerships and identify community advocates that can bring the public health message to those that need it,” he said.
Chow shared that many public health departments talk about addressing racism and public health disparities, but at King County, they are very intentional about that and discuss how to holistically serve the community in the context of its diverse needs.
King County is diverse, but diversity comes with different needs.
“What I hope to do is maintain that momentum on that particular objective and implement across those communicable disease processes,” he said.
“Each community has unique perspectives on what their needs are and we need to work with those community champions to identify where we can best serve them regardless of what communicable diseases come our way,” he added.
Nina can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.
This health series is made possible by funding from the Public Health – Seattle & King County, which has no editorial input or oversight of this content.