Orange County health commissioner is leaving post to run Nassau County health department

GOSHEN - The health commissioner who steered Orange County through the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving her post after four years to run a bigger health department for a much bigger county on Long Island.

Dr. Irina Gelman is expected to start work as Nassau County health commissioner in September, overseeing public health programs in a county of 1.4 million people, more than triple the size of Orange. She is replacing Dr. Lawrence Eisenstein, who resigned after 11 years as Nassau's health commissioner. His last day of work was on Friday.

Gelman, 41, was hired by Orange County in 2018 after four years as public health director in upstate Fulton County, a county of 53,000 near Albany, and working before then as a podiatrist. She's earning $173,400 a year in Orange as head of a department that currently has 141 workers, including eight in the Medical Examiner's Office and 37 who were hired through grants.

She said she will oversee a staff of just under 200 in Nassau County. Her salary for that position couldn't be determined on Wednesday. Eisenstein's budgeted salary this year was $235,700.

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Gelman had been on the job in Orange County for less than two years when the coronavirus struck New York in early 2020 and set off a public-health crisis. The rampant infections, hospital cases and deaths that followed thrust Gelman and her counterparts around the U.S. into prominent and demanding roles as coordinators of the medical response and daily voices of guidance for the public.

In retrospect, no single phase of the extended pandemic stands out for her as harder or more stressful than others. What she remembers is the sheer duration, the months of working 12 to 16 hours a day and keeping a sleeping bag at the county's emergency operations center for overnight stays.

"It was definitely just never-ending," Gelman said in an interview, calling the bombardment of pandemic challenges "a relentless assault on all fronts" and "very much exhausting."

The pandemic took a heavy toll on Orange over more than two years. As of Wednesday, 1,185 county residents had died from COVID-19, and 1,488 currently had active cases of the virus, including 21 people who were hospitalized with severe symptoms.

In addition to the brutal COVID-19 pandemic, Gelman's tenure in Orange has been bookended by infectious-disease episodes. Orange and neighboring Rockland counties both had measles outbreaks in 2018 and 2019. And on Tuesday, Orange County officials revealed that traces of the polio virus had been found in wastewater at two locations in the county, less than two weeks after the first U.S. polio case in years was diagnosed in Rockland.

“It is disheartening to see a resurgence of polio, a disease that was largely eradicated long ago," Gelman said in announcing that discovery. "It is concerning that polio is circulating in our community, given the low rates of vaccination for this debilitating disease in certain areas of our County."

Gelman said the enduring lesson for her of the COVID-19 ordeal was the need for better communication by health authorities with the public, the media and medical providers, both at the local and national level.

"We have to improve over all our public health communication," she said.

Gelman, who says she's "very, very proud of the herculean response" by her staff to the pandemic, is set to talk to her peers from around the world about that very topic next week.

She'll give that presentation at the four-day International Conference on Emerging Infectious Diseases, hosted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at an Atlanta hotel. The gathering is expected to draw more than 1,500 public health professionals and is the first of its kind since 2018, before the pandemic. Gelman is one of three speakers scheduled for a 90-minute session on Tuesday about "pandemic preparedness and response."

She said Orange was one of the first counties to begin testing wastewater to monitor COVID-19 levels and warn communities when outbreaks appeared to be developing. In the future, she said hopes the pandemic ordeal will encourage governments to be more cognizant of emerging diseases and increase funding for public health staffing and disease prevention.

Orange County officials are still fielding resumes for candidates to replace Gelman and will likely name an acting commissioner to serve that role after she departs until a new commissioner is hired.

Chris McKenna covers government and politics for the Times Herald-Record and USA Today Network. Reach him at cmckenna@th-record.com.

This article originally appeared on Times Herald-Record: Orange health commissioner leaving to run Nassau health department