After 40 years in public healthcare, COVID 'in a way' defined Gail O'Neill's career

As a self-admitted "behind the scenes" person, Gail O'Neill took on a high profile over the past couple of years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even as the 66-year-old O'Neill exits as director of the Sangamon County Department of Public Health, a new variant has given rise to cases and hospitalizations after a relaxation of masks and remote working.

O'Neill insisted some of the sensible tactics the department had preached all along -- staying home from work if you're sick, getting tested before being around elderly or more vulnerable people or cracking windows to get air flow at larger gatherings -- were still in play this time around.

Memorial Health administrator tapped to lead Sangamon County Public Health Department

"It feels a little far away for how far we've come and how many different turns the pandemic took," O'Neill said during a one-on-one interview with The State Journal-Register last week. "But it's still not over. (COVID is) more going to be a part of our lives, like influenza and the other respiratory illnesses that we have. We don't want people to forget about it and get totally lax, but we don't want people to panic, either."

O'Neill, who has served as director since 2019, caps a nearly four-decade career in public health Friday. She plans to stay in Springfield where all of her immediate family lives.

On Tuesday, the county announced that John Ridley, the system administrator of ambulatory products and services for Memorial Health, had been nominated to succeed O'Neill.

Ridley's nomination is pending approval from the Sangamon County Board and the Sangamon County Board of Health.

Ridley would become only the third director of the county health department, which was started in 1990. The city of Springfield Health Department merged with the county department in 2006 and settled into its present location, at 2833 S. Grand Ave. E., the former Cub Foods building, in 2010.

Jim Stone was the county department's founding director and served in that capacity for 29 years.

O'Neill was part of the city health department with some other high-profile events, including immunizing nearly 22,000 local children against a deadly bacterial meningitis outbreak in 1994; the Lake Springfield leptospirosis outbreak in 1998; heightened vigilance locally to guard against biological warfare after the World Trade Center attack in 2001 and a flu vaccine shortage in 2005.

Getting the message through

The director acknowledged COVID "in a way" defined her career, just a little over a year after taking the top spot.

"I had the opportunity with this situation to feel like I was helping educate the community and give warnings and advice and guidance as best I could," O'Neill said. "I had a really good team here at the health department helping, the medical community, support from my county board and the county administration that many health departments did not have."

Through the Illinois Public Health Administrators Association especially, O'Neill said she heard about death threats to health department directors or about county boards that weren't going to enforce any mitigations.

O'Neill said she fielded her share of calls from people disagreeing with mitigations the department was employing but never felt physically threatened.

And, yes, O'Neill thinks COVID was politicized as an issue.

"I think that happens with all kinds of things," she said. "We live in a community, in a world where people have all kinds of opinions, and they share them. I think COVID was a big illness where suddenly people had access to any (device) anytime they wanted, where they could (something) find out.

"You try to get the message through every day, and you have to realize people have differences of opinion and you want to say, 'Boy, that's not the best decision to make at this point.' Sometimes it helped to hear what people were saying. Sometimes, people with different opinions do have something right that we may hadn't discovered yet.

"I felt I had the advice of three highly educated doctors (Dr. Brian Miller, president of the Sangamon County Board of Health and Dr. Donald Graham and Dr. Vidya Sundareshan, infectious disease specialists). I felt my role was to turn what they said, sometimes very complicated sounding, into something the public could hear and understand and make some decisions, hopefully, ones that would help them and help other people."

Still, O'Neill heard and saw it all: distrust about vaccines; defiance over shutdowns and large gatherings and numbness about those numbers the county was putting out.

Allies at work and at home

Having a biostatistician provided by SIU School of Medicine for the county, O'Neill said, was useful to link to global, national and state numbers, as was bringing on Jeff Wilhite as a communications person to get that information out in a timely fashion.

Springfield-area director of public health retiring at the end of September

O'Neill, Sundareshan said, involved her early in the pandemic and always took a team approach.

"Everyone who needed to be there for any information for cutting-edge decisions, she made sure they were involved," she added. "I would say that was something exceptional about (O'Neill).

"She kept communications very transparent, open and up to date. Her very calm demeanor helped a lot. I've never seen her get upset or angry about anything."

That self-reflective and even-keel nature helped her deal with the magnitude and uncertainty of the situation, O'Neill admitted, as did another domestic ally, her husband, Joe.

"I just worked the job," O'Neill said. "My husband took care of home, took care of the clothes, took care of the house, made sure I was fed, so I was pretty spoiled at that end. I could try to leave the day and get some rest and come back.

"It always felt like we were doing good for the community and doing the best we could and making the best decisions we could in each different situation."

O'Neill admitted this time around she didn't know how many people were going to take the vaccine for the COVID variant, particularly because they would have to pay for the shots and get reimbursed.

"I don't think we're going to see a mad rush for the vaccine," she said. "We're not going to have that kind of volume of vaccine at any given time as best as I can predict. We ordered 110 doses to start with and that seems kind of small compared to the thousands we've done in the past, but we can keep replenishing the supply, so we'll do things by appointment to start out, unless something changes.

"I know we have the staff to handle it and the county backing to support us in anything we do as a health department."

Contact Steven Spearie: 217-622-1788; sspearie@sj-r.com; X, twitter.com/@StevenSpearie.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Sangamon County Public Health Director Gail O'Neill retires