This week on Inland Journal, the public perception of public health has changed in the last five years, since the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. What was once one of America’s most trustworthy institutions has slipped in the minds of many. We talk about that with Dennis Worsham, the new secretary of the Washington Department of Health.
"I think we've taken for granted that public health was the trusted voice. And we didn't have to slow down and always explain our whys. And COVID was tough because you're responding to a situation in real time. You have people who are dying. You have hospitals that are over capacity...and we just kept moving forward with our policies and our recommendations. And I think we should have probably had enough conversation in there to bring people along. And I think that that's the part that we have to do now is slow down and talk more about the whys of what we do."
Reporter Nate Sanford has studied how government workers in Washington cities are using artificial intelligence tools in their daily work.
"I was curious if they knew the extent to which employees were using it. I was kind of wondering if like, maybe they had no idea, right? And this was entirely people, employees kind of just using it, taking initiative by themselves, right? To use these tools. But neither were surprised when I talked to them. And they both said, yeah, we're encouraging staff to use these tools to make government more efficient."
And Eliza Billingham meets actor, comedian and writer Pete Holmes, who is performing his show this week in Spokane.
Holmes, on doing deeply spiritual comedic material: "We don't have a lot of safe places to engage in that....I'm trying to just be like, we all get to talk about this, even in between two jokes that might be dirty or wild. Right there in the middle is an earnest joke about the mystery of existence. That in itself is the message—-that, like, we get to talk about this too. It doesn't belong to the people with the funny hats and the incense and the bells and the robes and the caves."
