Thurston County gets new Health Officer as Dr. Diana Yu prepares to re-enter retirement
Thurston County welcomes a new health officer this week, with Dr. Dimyana Abdelmalek stepping into the role as Dr. Diana Yu prepares to re-enter retirement.
The most recent permanent health officer, Dr. Rachel Wood, left her post last November. Dr. Yu, who served as the county’s Health Officer for 23 years before retiring in 2013, stepped up in March specifically to lead the county’s COVID-19 response during the county’s nationwide search for a permanent hire.
According to a recent letter to the community from Dr. Yu, new Health Officer Abdelmalek has a medical degree from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in The Bronx borough of New York City and completed an Emergency Medicine residency at Washington University in St. Louis. She also has a master;s degree in Public Health from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Abdelmalek’s done international public health work in the Middle East, according to the letter. Most recently, she has been working as an emergency physician at Kaiser Permanente Redwood City Medical Center in California and has led a group that uses “a multidisciplinary approach to connect patients with complex medical and social needs with resources.”
“She brings a well-rounded background, fresh ideas and a comprehensive approach to community health,” Yu’s letter reads. “I am looking forward to her advocating for the health of Thurston County residents.”
Departing words from Dr. Yu
In an interview with The Olympian on her last day leading Thurston’s coronavirus response, Dr. Yu reflected on her 16 weeks in the role. The day she started, March 11, was coincidentally the same day Thurston County discovered its first case of COVID-19 in a resident.
After retiring from full-time public health work in 2013, Yu had continued to work as a health officer in Mason County one day per week, she told The Olympian, before leaving that role last year. She’s since been traveling, visiting Mexico and The Philippines, where her mother lives.
She’s found a passion in “active aging,” encouraging people to remain active as they grow older. A latecomer to physical activity herself, she discovered how much she loves dance in 2007 — she teaches Zumba classes and said she’s now “walking her talk” as a public health professional.
When COVID-19 emerged, she said she was “a spectator watching everything unfold,” visiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website and checking in on the World Health Organization for updates. She sent a message to some public health officials to say that, when she returned from The Philippines, she’d be ready to jump in and do some work.
Being a “disease detective,” she said, is a part of being a Public Health Officer that got her excited.
The first case here was simple to deal with, she said. Then the county started seeing more cases slowly trickling in. Yu said they laid the groundwork for how to investigate cases locally — she would take part in meetings with state health officials and other local and tribal health officials to make sure they were working from a similar understanding.
One of the first things she did was to take a survey of nursing homes, she said, to make sure they knew what to do and how to prepare. And there was outreach to physicians, other agencies, and the community.
At first, she saw people in the community really listening, staying home “even though they felt like the advice was kind of fickle, changing,” she said.
“And it does — and it did — keep changing, because we are continuing to learn new things all the time,” she said.
One thing she’s learned over so many years in public health, she said, was to not question her decisions in the moment — to make the best possible decision at the time with the evidence you have, but to change it and explain why later, if more evidence comes forward.
“There’s a lot of input, then my main role was what I call ‘anticipatory guidance,’” Yu said. “I try to figure out what might happen next, what’s going to happen next. What do we need, what’s missing.”
In Phase 1, the county “did superbly” and kept numbers low, she said.
“I had absolute confidence when we applied for Phase 2 that yes, we can ride this out,” Yu said. Then, the very first day in Phase 2 brought an outbreak at a long-term care facility. After dealing with the fallout from that outbreak, the daily number of new cases again fell to a “reasonable” number.
But then, near the end of Phase 2, people started getting “pandemic fatigue,” she said. They were going out, meeting in groups.
She’s “disturbed” by what the county is seeing now. Several cases have been announced per day in the last couple weeks, and they’re in younger residents.
People are catching the disease while traveling to places with high-case counts, going to birthday parties and graduation parties, meeting up with friends. And the patients tend to have had more contacts than the one or two cases early diagnoses reported.
At some point, Yu said, Health Officer Dr. Abdelmalek will have to make a decision whether to move back to Phase 2.
Dr. Yu, meanwhile, will re-enter retirement again soon. She plans to teach more Zumba, relax, and volunteer with the Medical Reserve Corps to continue helping out. She plans to continue limiting her outings and group gatherings to settings where she can physically distance and face coverings are encouraged, she wrote in her recent letter.
She’ll also continue advocating on social media for masking, keeping physical distance from others, washing hands, and staying home when you’re sick. It’s a long road ahead, she said.
“I think that the community hears the message, and I’m counting on them,” Yu said. “I’m going to be part of that community. I’m counting on us to really stay our course, to protect each other. When we don’t, it’s very painful.”
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