Public Health Lab
COVID-19 Stories: Bret

“I'm Bret, and I work in the Infectious Disease Lab in the Emergency Preparedness and Response Unit. I've been with MDH since October 2017.

“I would say initially the first four to six months of [COVID-19] were uncharted territory. With my job, doing some of the logistics aspects like physically coordinating specimen transport or coordinating testing supplies on the front end of our operations, I was able to move around a lot, and I think that was really helpful for my mental health during the pandemic. I think a lot of people that worked in the lab didn't have that luxury, due to the nature of the work. I really felt for those people that would get stuck sitting basically in one spot in the lab all day and didn’t have a chance to move much.

“We found out as the pandemic went along that the state lab had the most efficient testing turnaround times for results. We were able to get results back to people really quickly, whereas a lot of labs in other places around the state and even nationally were getting results back in three to five days or sometimes five to seven days. We were turning things around in 48 hours or less, so some people were getting a result back in a day, sometimes two days.

“I think the pandemic is an excellent example of how effective the state was, specifically, with testing and turnaround times and getting results back to people as fast as we could. We were able to maintain that efficiency despite the increase in demand, even as the volumes of specimens coming in were surging.

“We have some of the best in the business here in our state lab in Minnesota. After that first three months or so, I would say maybe in the summer and into the fall of 2020, things got to a point where we were fairly confident in what we were doing. We had a well-oiled machine going. And even though the demand was still high for our work, and people were still working really hard, we just got a little more confident in what we were doing.

“There were times during COVID-19 where I was getting at least 500 emails a day, maybe more. I remember very vividly there was this one instance in the beginning of the pandemic where my desk phone rang and then my work cell phone rang, so I was on two calls simultaneously. Then, while on those calls, I got another incoming call on my desk phone and another incoming call on my work cell phone at the same time. Within 30 seconds, I got four calls at once, and they were all asking for my help coordinating COVID-19 testing logistics. Insane scenarios like that were happening all the time that you never would have thought would happen under any normal circumstances.

“People had a real sense of duty to come in, but there were a lot of struggles for many folks, because their spouses or other people were being pulled out of their workplace and were working from home, their kids were having to do online learning for the first time, etc., and yet a lot of our employees in the lab had to physically come in to do their work.

“There was this extra added burden not only from everything that was going on around them in the outside world, but there was also a burden of what was going on in their home life and not being able to be at home or help their kids with school.

“This was probably the most stress and pressure put on people in their professional lives, and you could sense that there was a lot of people struggling around the office with that. I think there's a lot of people that are still pretty scarred from the experience.

“Things in the last year or so have definitely gotten more normal. People started to slowly come back to the workplace, but there was a good period of two full years or so where nothing looked like we remembered it. The COVID-19 pandemic really was a once-in-a-lifetime, if not even multiple lifetimes, event.”

PHL COVID-19 Stories is a series about the experiences of Public Health Lab employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.