Q&A: Dr. McCullers on how Memphis managed the pandemic — and what still makes people mad
Dr. Jon McCullers (right), senior associate dean of the University of Tennessee Health Sciences Center and Dr. Alisa Haushalter (left), Shelby County Health Department Director, answer questions about the COVID-19 virus during a daily update press briefing at the Shelby County Emergency Management and Homeland Security office on March 19, 2020. (Jim Weber/The Daily Memphian file)
Geoff Calkins
Geoff Calkins has been chronicling Memphis and Memphis sports for more than two decades. He is host of "The Geoff Calkins Show" from 9-11 a.m. M-F on 92.9 FM. Calkins has been named the best sports columnist in the country five times by the Associated Press sports editors, but still figures his best columns are about the people who make Memphis what it is.
Dr. Jon McCullers, who spearheaded the Memphis area’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, is headed to a new job at Houston’s Tilman J. Fertitta Family College of Medicine. I caught up with him to get his thoughts on how Memphis handled those difficult years.
In the course of our conversation, McCullers revealed that he was diagnosed with cancer not long after the pandemic began. You can read more about McCullers’s personal battle here. The following Q&A concerns the pandemic, more specifically. It has been edited for length.
Geoff Calkins: How do you think Memphis did during the pandemic?
Dr. Jon McCullers: I’m very proud of what we did as a team. We balanced the need to keep the community safe with the need to not have the economy collapse. And the key to me, from the very beginning, was that all of our elected officials — not just from Memphis and Shelby County but all the surrounding counties, including from Mississippi and Arkansas — had to be part of this coalition, so we’re all doing the same thing, and doing it together, and you don’t have different rules as soon as you cross state lines.
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