As emergency planner and public information officer for the Audrain County Health Department, Chris Newbrough is responsible for telling people bad news, as well as good. But keeping residents …
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As emergency planner and public information officer for the Audrain County Health Department, Chris Newbrough is responsible for telling people bad news, as well as good. But keeping residents informed is something he's been doing much of his career.
Before joining ACHD, Newbrough was with KWWR. He also wrote for newspapers in Fulton and in Illinois. Despite being born and raised in Mexico, Newbrough somehow became a die hard fan of the Chicago Cubs.
1. What's wrong with you?
[Laughs] That bad part is I used to be a Cardinals fan. But I loved baseball more than I loved the Cardinals and in 1984 I was listening when Ryne Sandberg hit two home runs off Bruce Sutter. I started to watch him and have been a Cub fan ever since.
2. Have you sought help?
Hey, the Cubs may have had 80 years of torture, but you had the '70s.
3. For the last year you've been the bearer of bad news.
Yeah, I send out the COVID reports each week. My journalism background has given me a thick skin.
4. Does it get depressing?
When the numbers are high, sure. Maybe not depressing, but disappointing. All we can do is keep educating people. Education is power.
5. Has the county's response to the pandemic been good?
We didn't run and hide from it. We started dealing with it with the tools that we had, and sometimes created tools we needed.
6. How difficult was it to pull together the mass vaccination clinic?
We had four days. We had an inkling, so we started working with Nick Tietsort at Emergency Management. We put our heads together with the county, the city and other agencies and were able to pull it off.
7. With so much focus on COVID, was it easy to lose track of other issues?
We have so many other programs that we managed to keep viable. The WIC program -- we set up a drive through window. And that's just one example. We adapted and it has worked.
8. What are the challenges of rural health, communications-wise?
It's completely different from metro areas. You're trying to get the message to a varied population. In metro areas you have multiple media outlets and channels of information. In rural areas you have to find different ways to get the message across.
9. You must work with a lot of different people.
The key is networking, knowing who to call. We needed barriers for the mass vaccination clinic. That's not something we normally deal with in public health. I knew to talk to Nick. He has contacts I don't have.
10. The Cardinals have 11 world series titles. You have three.
I don't care [laughs].
