Dedication, passion drive public face of COVID fight
Dr. Joe Gastaldo’s days start at 4:30 a.m. with the glow of news sites on his phone and often end lost in a videogame world.
In between, the medical director for infectious diseases at Ohiohealth seems to not be governed by the rules of time. If he ever runs out of it, he just makes more.
“Everybody can find two hours,” is one of his philosophies, and indeed, in the past year, he has seemed to find time for everyone.
Gastaldo, 51, is mega-smart, friendly, articulate, down-to-earth and passionate about his job, particularly about absorbing all the information he can about COVID-19 and passing it along to his colleagues and the public.
“I’m a perpetual learner,” he said.
His partner for the past 14 years, Jason Ninnemann, called Gastaldo, “the most dedicated and resilient person I know.”
Couple those traits with a boundless enthusiasm and physical stamina, and it’s the reason why
Ohiohealth officials at the start of the pandemic tapped Gastaldo to be their public face.
He has made frequent appearances on Gov. Mike Dewine’s COVID-19 briefings, taped public-service announcements, attended town halls and meetings, and been the go-to source when interview requests come in from newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations nationwide.
From March 1, 2020, through Tuesday, Gastaldo had conducted 475 interviews, or more than one a day for over a year.
“We didn’t sit around scratching our heads saying, `Oh my goodness, who should do this?’” said Dr. Amy Imm, vice president of medical affairs for Ohiohealth. “It kind of became this de facto thing. He was just it. He was ready. The answer was always Joe.”
Equal treatment for all
Gastaldo is the fourth of Gus and Roberta Gastaldo’s five children and the youngest son. The family has Italian heritage, and Gus made a living as a salesman.
Gastaldo lived in Dennison and Galion as a child (in Tuscarawas and Crawford counties, respectively) before the family moved to Gahanna when Joe was in fifth grade.
He graduated from St. Charles Preparatory School, went on to get a pharmacy degree from Ohio Northern University in Ada and then headed to Wright State University in Dayton for medical school.
After interning at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, Gastaldo took a job at a hospital in Greenwich, Conn., a well-to-do suburb of New York City.
Gastaldo said he realized the job wasn’t for him when he got a call at home one night, summoning him. A celebrity (he won’t name names) had come into the hospital with “a possible tick bite,” and Gastaldo was offended that the staff was treating this person like a special case.
“As a doctor, you never want to lose objectivity,” he said. “We should go through all the same processes. Whether you’re the Queen of England or a homeless person, they should get the same care.
“I remember thinking, `This is not the type of person I am.’”
He asked for a release from his contract, having been in Connecticut for six months, and in 2002, he accepted a job at Ohiohealth Riverside Methodist Hospital.
There, he made the rounds of patients (18 to 25 a day, he said) suffering from the typical range of ailments that infectious disease specialists handle in non-pandemic times: hepatitis, staph infections, HIV.
He also quickly developed a reputation as someone always seeking knowledge and wanting to share that information with colleagues.
“Joe has always been the consummate professional,” Imm said. “He’s so passionate about everything that he does, and part of that passion, besides being knowledgeable, is that he’s passionate about being an educator.
“And he does it all with such humility. He’s about the least arrogant person you’ll ever find. He goes out of his way for everybody.”
That includes his mother, who says she has learned to keep quiet about her needs around him.
“If I say, `Oh, that’s pretty cute,’ or `Gee, that’s nice,’ the next week, I have it,” Roberta Gastaldo said, “so I try to keep my mouth shut, because he would give me anything I want.”
Before the pandemic hit, Gastaldo enjoyed attending the weekly Sunday afternoon dinners at his parents’ house, where 25 or more family members would gather and enjoy pasta: spaghetti, cavatelli, ravioli and sauce – all of it of course homemade.
Life speeds up
As far back as November 2019, Gastaldo said, he and his colleagues were trying to learn all they could about the strange new disease that originated in Asia and made its way to American shores early in 2020.
Already, Gastaldo was an early riser by habit. A selfdescribed “news junkie,” he starts each day checking out Google News, USA Today and CNBC before getting out of bed and hitting the gym.
With the onset of the pandemic, Gastaldo added a range of podcasts to his listening routine, catching
them in the car and while working out.
His playlist ranges from the relatively routine (NPR) to the wonky: TWIV (This Week in Virology) by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. He also found himself watching medical-news videos on Youtube often enough that about six months ago, “I splurged and got Youtube’s premium service, which is awesome because there’s no commercials.”
Work began creeping more and more into his home life, though, with the onset of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s weekly live Zoom meeting for medical professionals, updating them on the latest COVID-19 news.
Those are at Saturday at 3 p.m., and Gastaldo is a regular listener.
“They’re only an hour,” he said, but Ninnemann began to think that Gastaldo needed to draw a line somewhere.
“I’ll be making dinner and trying to talk to him, and he’s got his little Airpods in,” Ninnemann said.
The constant barrage of interviews he conducts also can interfere.
“There was one Saturday, he had already done two or three media interviews in a day and he gets a call at 6:30 at night from a Chicago TV station,” Ninnemann said. “I told him, `You can say no for once, you need to take time for yourself.’”
Gastaldo turned that request down. The two enjoy watching Netflix in the evenings in the Linworth-area house they share with their cat, Gino. Gastaldo also plays videogames to unwind.
For the holidays, Ninnemann bought Gastaldo a Playstation 5 game system so he could better enjoy his favorite game: Assassin’s Creed.
“I’ll tell him to go upstairs and assassinate somebody,” Ninnemann said.
Of his alter-ego, Gastaldo said, “Videogames are such a way to disconnect. I go to a different world and compete with somebody else in a fantasy land.”
Back in the real world, Gastaldo keeps up his learning, educating and interviewing as if he was getting paid by the word.
“My mindset through the whole thing has been if somebody heard me and because of what I said, they got vaccinated, or because of what I said, they wore a mask, then my job is done,” he said. “If one person changes their behavior, that’s what gratifies me.” kgordon@dispatch.com
@kgdispatch