Now I know the pandemic didn’t break my idealism

Key Takeaways

as told by Megan Dunn, Snohomish County, Wash. Council member

I started my first term in January 2020. In addition to being member of the County Council, I was also sworn in as a member of the Board of Health. 

Then, a month later, we had the first confirmed case of COVID in the United States in Snohomish County. Then a few weeks later, we had a pandemic on our hands. 

We had 15-member board of health, it became a county department later. The merger had been discussed and studied prior to COVID, but COVID helped make the decision to move forward with combining the two.

Adjusting wasn’t that hard, I was the only new councilmember and my predecessor went on to become the county treasurer, so I always had a place to go to learn how we do things. I had been attending county meetings for two years before I took office, I knew how the council worked together.

I had a few weeks to get to know people, but I still had to introduce myself to some people over Zoom before too long. 

I had a background in environmental health but not epidemiology, so I was learning a lot. I got to see our health officer apply a tuberculosis approach when there was no protocol for COVID, so that became a baseline for how we treated isolation and contact tracing.

The most important thing was information exchange. I had never been in elected office before, I was a community advocate. Snohomish County had a strategy for disseminating information down through the different layers of government, so when we’d have updates, we’d be in touch with school boards, school districts, mayors and tribal leaders. Then, I heard from a lot of human service providers who wanted to be in the loop, so I started calling meetings and  finding experts to speak, people from our human services department and health department. Rules were changing weekly to daily, sometimes hourly. 

Despite all that happened in those four years and the challenges we faced, I decided to run for reelection last year, so all of those challenges didn’t break the idealism that made me want to run for office. I’m a cynical idealist, I still believe in mutual aid and people coming together and all of us working for the better and I always assume good intentions.