Gabriela Hurtado is a Medical Countermeasures Coordinator for the City of Long Beach, CA. In the past two years, she expanded existing city pandemic preparedness plans to develop citywide testing, and, when the time came, helped create a citywide vaccination effort to serve the 400,000+ community members of Long Beach.
“To operationalize our plans for the test sites, we basically took our anthrax plan and adjusted it for COVID-19. It's not like it was all from scratch, but we were creative and able to build on that existing knowledge to serve the community.”
Hurtado partnered with government agencies across the city to develop a unified effort against COVID-19, with the goal of creating accessible test sites and vaccines for all community members.
Hurtado began her career with the City of Long Beach as an intern in 2012, building community awareness of emergency preparedness measures. In the nine years since, she has helped develop the emergency management division; In particular, Gabriela assisted with HIV surveillance efforts, flu vaccine rollouts, and bioterrorism preparedness before focusing in on pandemic preparedness in 2019, and putting skills into practice in early 2020.
“Vaccines are really my niche so it was exciting when I was able to participate in the vaccine rollout. Vaccination is something that we are really well versed in as a department because we do a flu vaccination every year. We took our plan that we practice every year with the flu vaccine, swapped out the flu, and inserted the COVID vaccine.”
Long Beach Public Health Nurses drawing up COVID-19 vaccines at the Convention Center. Source: Gabriela Hurtado.
Throughout a year and a half of pandemic management, Hurtado has juggled the opinions of stakeholders, community members, and public health officials in developing a just pandemic response.
“I think in all of this, the most difficult part was that for so long we did our job and no one noticed. I think that's a good thing, right? Because that means we're doing our job well. But when COVID-19 happened, all of a sudden everyone was an emergency manager, an epidemiologist, a statistician. I think that was really difficult because our entire team serves as subject matter experts, but then you have politics come into play. And It's challenging when everything on the news or social media is negative all the time. It's so divisive and polarizing that I have to remind myself and our team constantly, ‘we're doing this for everyone else, not just for us’. I think that really helps.
I think that one of the other really challenging pieces is trying to reinstate ourselves as a trustworthy entity. Because we would never ask the community to do something that we wouldn't do ourselves. Trying to navigate that was really difficult; specifically, trying to make sure that all of our communities of color were getting the information and not just getting it, but understanding it and knowing that it came from a trustworthy source. I think those are probably the two hardest parts of this pandemic from an emergency management standpoint.”
Amidst the myriad of challenges brought on by the past two years as a Medical Countermeasures Coordinator, Gabriela has taken on a role as a public health authority and community spokesperson in the COVID-19 response in Long Beach, CA.
Command staff that led the Convention Center-Public Health Emergency Management team, Fire Department, and National Guard. Source: Gabriela Hurtado.
“I've never been in this type of leadership position before where there's so many people looking to me for information or answers. I have to remind myself that a lot of people are going to feed off of my energy. If I'm stressed and overwhelmed, everybody else is going to feel that too. So I have to remind myself that it's okay to have off-days or off-moments, but just because it's a bad moment, doesn’t mean it's a bad day.”
I always remember the day that we went down to the convention center and they were like, ‘okay, Gabby what do you want to see? How do you want us to set this up?’ I literally said, ‘I want this to look and feel like Disneyland’. At the time we were seeing up to 6,000 people a day. And, we had signage everywhere and everyone was so happy to see the next person in line. It was not just our team being happy to see this next person getting vaccinated, but it was also the community sharing their gratitude and their hope from a vaccine, which I think is my favorite piece of all of this.”
Gabriela overseeing the drive thru vaccine clinic at the Convention Center. At the height of vaccination, 6,000 residents passed through the Convention Center daily. Source: Gabriela Hurtado.