Is Amy Acton the Pandemic’s Most Midwestern Hero?

For Ohioans sheltering in place, 2 p.m. is Happy(ish) Hour, alternately referred to by the masses as “Wine With DeWine” and “Snackin’ With Acton.”

That’s when Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, and Department of Health Director Amy Acton, M.D. M.P.H, hold the state’s daily press conferences. While Governor Gavin Newsom in California and Governor Andrew Cuomo in New York (both Democrats) have been praised for their handling of the coronavirus crisis, it’s in fact DeWine who has scored highest in polls, with 85% approval statewide for his handling of the first phase of the pandemic.

DeWine, a career politician who won his first race back when Acton was in middle school, has been described as an “old-school compassionate conservative” (despite his vehement anti-choice positions). He leads a red state in the Trump era. But he was also the first governor nationwide to close schools, bars, and restaurants to stop the spread of COVID-19.

The moves set him apart from Republican governors in states like Florida and Georgia—and put him at odds with the president. But DeWine hasn’t acted (nor broken lockstep with Donald Trump’s halting COVID-19 response) alone. While National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, M.D., was facepalming over President Trump’s shoulder, DeWine was implementing guidance from his state’s top doctor: Acton.

In Ohio she’s become something of a folk hero for her frank discussion of what we do and do not know about coronavirus. Her state orders and emphatic, empathetic check-ins have helped Ohioans pace the transmission of the virus. In a representative appearance in the first few weeks of the pandemic, she acknowledged, “We all…need to learn to live through something we’ve never dealt with before.” Acton has been called the real MVP of Ohio’s coronavirus response. Outside of the state, she’s a model for a quieter, unusual kind of leadership—the rare public health expert who has appealed to and been able to establish an alliance with a conservative governor.

Recently the New York Times published a video in its Opinion section about Acton entitled “The Leader We Wish We All Had.” An Acton Facebook fan club composed of “grateful and concerned citizens” now has nearly 135,000 members and celebrates her for “bustin’ her buckeyes to keep Ohio safe.” She’s become the subject of strange tributes: a Rosie the Riveter meme, a cartoon Laverne & Shirley parody, a bobblehead, and videos of little girls in white coats emulating the good doctor.

Ohio is where it is now—tenuously having flattened the curve and reopening in phases—because DeWine had the wisdom to heed Acton’s expertise and put her recommendations into action. And Acton trusted her intuition not just because of what she saw in the data but because she has, as she puts it, a “danger meter that goes off quicker than the average person.”

Amy Acton’s danger meter—honed as a child, growing up in grim circumstances—registered an alarm back in early 2020 after a call with the CDC, when a global epidemiologist started talking about a new virus in China. Acton heard the experience and worry in the epidemiologist’s voice and began mobilizing her team “doing what we do for outbreaks of infectious disease, even in January,” Acton remembers. It dawned on her this could be a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.

Within a month, she suggested to the governor a table-top drill to model how an outbreak of the virus in Ohio might look, and what the government would have to do if various scenarios took place here. “It took a while, because just like it is now, it’s hard for people to get their hands around something you can’t see and that hasn’t happened yet,” she says.

In mid-February, she attended meetings at the White House and sensed again that things were worse than headlines made them out to be. “I could just feel it in them,” she says, of the experts who addressed the group. “I could see their worry, and I just knew. I just knew in my gut. They know more than I know. Something’s up here.” Later that month, Acton notes, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease, was warning that disruption to daily life in the United States could be “severe.”

Between students’ planned travel for spring break and the back-and-forth of business travelers, Acton had begun to fear that the disease was already in the state and spreading. Without tests, there was no confirming it at the time. (Now, she notes, recent autopsies have shown evidence of COVID-19 circulating in Ohio as early as January or February.)

In March, Acton kicked into gear. She “guesstimated” at a press conference that given lack of testing, transmission rates, and what she’d seen from studies of how asymptomatic carriers could spread the virus, Ohio might have a whopping 100,000 cases in a state with a population of 11.7 million. This was back when just 1,300 people nationwide had tested positive for COVID-19 (due in large part to insufficient testing). DeWine repeated the numbers on Fox News; news outlets from coast to coast covered the figures. Acton was surprised her estimate went viral. Ohio still doesn’t have exact numbers to establish COVID-19’s prevalence, but her instinct that the disease was spreading, undetected, has been borne out.

Observers have marveled over DeWine’s readiness to defer to Acton. Some have expressed shock that the same man who signed legislation to ban abortions after six weeks has been willing to listen to not just a woman with medical expertise, but a former organizer for President Barack Obama. When Acton herself was called in for an interview to be considered as director of the state department of health after DeWine’s 2019 swearing-in, she didn’t expect to get the job, so she was more candid than she otherwise might have been. “[I] told him exactly who I was,” she remembers.

At one point in their conversation, Acton—who talks with her hands—got so excited she tapped him on the shoulder, and all the other people in the room froze, stunned. Acton said out loud, “Oh, my God. Don’t touch the governor!” realizing she’d broken etiquette. She left thinking she didn’t have a chance at the job. But within half an hour, she received a text with news that DeWine wanted to meet again. She now believes that he respects that she can “speak truth to power.” And what’s more, she adds, the fact “that he welcomes that [tells me] a lot about him as a leader.”

The impulse to trust her gut, insist hard truths be heard, and swing into a protective stance is built into Acton—a function of both her personal experiences and a representation of the place she (and I) grew up. We both come from Youngstown, Ohio, a place that—if known outside the state—is shorthanded as Rust Belt. In its entrenched, generational poverty, survival can be an earned skill. And a childhood there trains a person to see that, in dire circumstances, sometimes getting through means going together.

As Acton once shared in our hometown paper, The Vindicator, her childhood was marked with periods of homelessness (for a time she lived in a tent outside Youngstown), and one of her mother’s partners sexually abused her. The last time she saw her mother was in child court. After that, Acton went to live with her father. She was voted homecoming queen, class of 1984. She paid her own tuition through Youngstown State University and then medical school at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine. She didn’t talk much about her upbringing.

But her past lives in her. She remembers neighbors, who—seeing her “smelling bad, dirty, walking to school, and, knowing we were hungry”—would offer her food, she recalls. For Acton, school was one of few safe spaces, a place with square meals, books, and warmth. When she calls on people in Ohio to look out for the vulnerable in this crisis, she knows what “vulnerable” feels like.

During the shutdown, data suggests domestic abuse is rising worldwide. Reports of child abuse in Ohio have halved during the shutdown, which doesn’t mean that children are safer, but rather that they have less exposure to outside, caring adults who can watch out for them and report harm. When Acton first talked to other scientists who’d designed the pandemic response measures that states are implementing now, Acton’s immediate thought was, What’s a kid trapped at home in bad circumstances going to do? She understands that even policies enacted in order to protect lives have cascading consequences.

It’s one of the reasons she keeps telling Ohioans to (safely) check in on one another. “Lifelines get to people,” she tells me. “The abuse and things I went through as a kid went on, but there were always these little lifelines that would come along at just the right time—a kind person, a kind teacher, someone who bore witness.”

Now bearing witness is her job. In a press conference on April 28, Acton described how she experienced PTSD for the first time as a medical resident in the Bronx, over a decade after her childhood trauma. At that time, during the crack cocaine epidemic, she was treating rooms full of babies in incubators whose parents had died. She lost 25 pounds, stopped sleeping, and had panic attacks for the first time.

It was an agonizing period, but she drew on the “damaged” parts of her, realizing that she held her own source of strength. Her pain—undeserved—has made her resilient. And it has sensitized her to the impact that this crisis will have on not just patients but those who treat them. Acton mentions a recent report about an E.R. doctor who died by suicide after what she’d witnessed in the hospital while treating coronavirus patients. Depression, feelings of hopelessness, getting overwhelmed at the magnitude of this disaster—it “can happen to anyone,” Acton tells me. “Because there are bad days, believe me. It’s not easy out here.” It’s the chance that she might be able to help someone else that keeps her motivated.

Still, success in public health is complicated, Acton admits. In a doctor’s one-on-one interaction with a patient, the task is not simple, but it is straightforward: to help the person heal. But to keep entire cities or states safe, part of doctors’ job becomes communication and messaging, and in our disinformation age, that’s a problem.

“When we do a good job, when we knock it out of the park in public health, people don’t see it, because we’ve prevented something bad from happening,” she says. With Ohio controlling the spread of the coronavirus relatively well, there are people who believe the entire pandemic is a hoax and “that what’s going on in New York couldn’t absolutely be happening here in Ohio.”

On May 1, Ohio was set to begin its phased reopen. Then, late on April 30, Acton announced that the state’s shelter-in-place order would remain in effect for an additional month, albeit with some new exemptions for those in manufacturing, distribution, and construction businesses, and later, paced reopenings of salons and dine-in restaurants.

As some grumbled over the extension, DeWine walked back the requirement to wear masks in stores and reclassified it as a recommendation. He said that the governmental intervention had “offended” some Ohioans who wouldn’t tolerate being told what to. For a state that led in its cautious and careful approach to the virus (albeit with major failings in the prison system), it was an awkward rollout announcement and marked the beginning of an uglier and more partisan stage of Ohio’s coronavirus response.

More protesters soon gathered at the statehouse, some with guns and flags, demanding that the state reopen. One protester charged Acton with “telling half-truths that change every single day.”

Others have gone further. Acton is a conspiracist’s triple threat—a scientist, a woman, and Jewish. After she commented that other countries were looking into certificates for those who have antibodies to the virus to let those individuals go back to work, the wife of a Republican state senator in Ohio took to Facebook (on Holocaust Remembrance Day) to liken the programs to a Nazi mandate. (She has since deleted the post.)

DeWine condemned the comments, calling them “a slur on a good, compassionate, and honorable person who has worked nonstop to save lives.” As Ohio wades into its phased reopening, protesters have started standing outside Acton’s home. According to reports, some are openly armed, which is legal in Ohio.

Soon after, DeWine scolded protestors for being “obnoxious” to members of the press and not observing social distancing rules. Then he added, “Let me say what else is not fair game. I’m the elected official. I’m the one who ran for office. I’m the one who makes the policy decisions. The members of my cabinet, Dr. Acton included, work exceedingly, exceedingly hard. But I set the policy, so when you don’t like the policy, again, you can demonstrate against me. That is certainly fair game. But to bother the family of Dr. Acton—I don’t think that’s fair game. I don’t think it’s right.”

Acton concedes that seeing people “through a thin glass window carrying semi-automatic machine guns” is “threatening.” But she also knows that most people are not patrolling her front door and that all across the state, her guidance is appreciated and followed.

Earlier this month, Columbus ob-gyn Anita Somani, M.D., helped organize a counterdemonstration around the Ohio statehouse in Acton’s honor. About 30 doctors and medical professionals, spaced six feet apart, wore scrubs, white coats, and masks, and offered messages of thanks.

“I think we unfortunately need to counteract some of these protesters…as scientists,” says Somani in a phone interview. She wants to remind people that public health initiatives undertaken in the past—from stopping drunk driving to normalizing seat belts—have saved countless lives. That’s the purpose masks and social distancing serve now. The medical professionals’ demonstration was meant to raise awareness, but it was also intended to be a show of support for Acton’s leadership. “We’re all out there supporting her with what we’re doing,” Somani says.

Within the week, Republican state lawmakers, who control the chamber, introduced and passed an amendment (along party lines) to limit Acton’s powers to issue such orders. If it passes the State Senate, Republican DeWine has pledged to veto it. The growing partisan rancor toward Acton hints at other anxieties, including that Acton, who is firm that she has no interest in running for office, would be a formidable candidate for statewide office given her wide esteem and name recognition.

After all, in a time when huge swaths of people are isolated, Acton has been a consistent presence. At 2 p.m., we see her. And her candor about this struggle makes us feel seen too.

“Being heard has a special meaning for me as a human being,” Acton tells me. Because of her childhood, she knows the “special [pain] and anguish” of not being listened to. She’s also 54, and ever more conscious of the rooms she enters in which she’s the only woman. There are times when she “can feel that tension.”

Behind closed doors, Acton is as frank as she was in that first interview with DeWine. Her role in front of the cameras has required some adjustment. “I’m still evolving,” she tells me. She doesn’t love public speaking, and it’s a bit of shock for her to realize just “how much I could have a voice.”

“I just hope anyone who reads this or listens to me realizes it’s a lifetime of becoming who you are and finding your voice and knowing where your compass is,” she says.

Channeling that basic instinct—and with the state’s case numbers and death rate guiding her—Acton will determine how Ohio navigates reopening businesses while also limiting transmission.

“We had to shut it down fast,” Acton explains, comparing it to the flip of a switch. “But what we want to do now is the dimmer switch, moving it just a notch and watching.”

“We all want—myself included—to just go back to what we knew,” says Acton. “But that’s wishful thinking.” Acton—prone to metaphors—repeats what is becoming her refrain: We’re still on the mountain. It’s going to be a hard path down.

Sarah Stankorb is an award-winning writer in Ohio. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Marie Claire, Glamour, O Magazine, and The Atlantic, among others.

Originally Appeared on Glamour