Dr. Allison Arwady’s typical day in the past week began at 6 a.m., scrolling through an “out-of-control” email inbox.
Then, she’d start taking calls. One would be about someone being tested for the new coronavirus that’s now become a worldwide pandemic. A conference call with her staff would follow. Then a roundtable discussion that included U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois.
By 1:30 p.m., she’d also briefed aldermen on the city’s response to the virus.
And how many times had the city’s commissioner of the Department of Public Health washed her hands?
Arwady pauses to think. Then, she lets loose an explosive laugh and says, “Let’s see — three, I would say!”
Then an update late in the week: “I’m washing my hands even more than I was even a few days ago!”
The past few weeks, Arwady, with her let’s take a breath and keep things in perspective manner, has become the city’s face for all things coronavirus. It started on Jan. 24, when she stood before an arc of TV cameras and news reporters to announce the city’s first — and the nation’s second — case of coronavirus.
Three weeks later, in Chinatown, she was urging people not to let “fear control your decisions.” She made a point of saying she was having lunch in a part of town that’s seen visitors dwindle over fears about the new virus, which first began its spread in Wuhan, China.
How is the woman who became the city’s public health commissioner in January — after holding that post in an acting role since last June — handling all of this?
“You can be calm when you’re confident in your team and in your plans and in your response,” says Arwady, 43, who grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan — her father the publisher of the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican newspaper, her mother a school teacher.
She has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s from Columbia and got her medical degree at Yale. She not only got around the Ivy League, but she also got around the world as a student, going overseas alone for a college summer job updating travel guides.
Over the span of her career, Arwady has gone places only an infectious diseases expert would embrace. She was there, for instance, with a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team at the start of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in western Africa.
“I would have gear on, and we would need to be disinfecting [our] shoes, being very careful about not touching things,” Arwady says. “This was in a setting, to be perfectly frank, where there was not adequate personal protective equipment for the hospitals, broadly.”
Arwady also was a part of a CDC team that investigated the 2012 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — MERS — outbreak in Saudi Arabia. And she spent about a year working with the CDC in Botswana, working on HIV and tuberculosis.
“Tuberculosis is a disease I find absolutely fascinating,” she says, almost giddy. “I love tuberculosis.”
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She is fascinated — and appalled — by the infectious diseases she has studied.
“When the Ebola outbreak was happening, it was intellectually interesting, but it was also really terrible,” Arwady says. “It’s not like, ‘Yay, there’s a new disease!’ It’s like, ‘This is very worrisome, and we have to be really serious and aggressive about understanding what is going on with this disease.’ ”
Brian Richardson, a deputy city health commissioner until early 2019, isn’t surprised that Arwady, a friend, usually is the person stepping forward and answering questions.
“Because she’s just that damn smart, and she’s that damn good,” says Richardson, now Midwest regional director of the gay-rights advocacy group Lambda Legal.
Dr. John Jay Shannon, who until last year was chief executive officer of Cook County’s health arm, says that even in an era in which public health’s emphasis generally has shifted from its communicable disease roots, it’s still vital to have people like Arwady who have that expertise.
“That kind of direct experience and working with the CDC, that’s very, very valuable training,” Shannon says.
Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), one of Arwady’s critics in the past, says she has been a capable leader in the city’s response to the virus. Last October, Arwady infuriated Ramirez-Rosa and several other aldermen when, during her nomination hearing, she acknowledged that 200,000 Chicagoans need mental health care but argued that reopening shuttered city clinics isn’t the answer.
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Ramirez-Rosa says his differences with Arwady are over “policy” and “vision.”
But he says, “Dr. Arwady is a very competent and prepared individual.”
So much so, Richardson says, “It’s clear to the elected officials that she is someone who knows what she’s doing, too. So they are happy to pass the microphone to her.”
Arwady says people have begun to recognize her — and ask her about coronavirus.
“I can’t walk down the street without somebody asking me should they fly here and should they go here, and ‘I have this underlying condition, and what should I being doing?’ ” she says.
Arwady doesn’t have children. But that doesn’t keep her from dispensing motherly advice.
“I made sure my nieces and nephews had all really gotten their flu shots,” she says. “I called their mothers.”
What advice is she giving to her own extended family?
“The things we’re recommending for the general public are the same things I recommend to my family and the same things that I’m doing myself,” Arwady says.
In those increasingly rare moments when she’s not thinking about public health, Arwady, who is single, sees patients once a week. She likes to do pottery. And she sometimes can be found leading river and walking tours of Chicago architecture.
“I do a public health spin,” she says. “I talk about reversing the river. I talk about the public health implications of what the Great Chicago Fire was.”
She’s clearly not intimidated by a crowd, whether it’s a group of tourists or a gaggle of reporters.
But is there anything that keeps Arwady awake at night?
“I think about: Have we done enough?” she says. “We’ve done all that we can think of to do. And we’re doing more every day. But I’m always thinking ahead about all the potential scenarios, including worst-case scenarios.”
