Public Health Lab
COVID-19 Stories: Dave
“I'm Dave, and I worked at the Minnesota Department of Health for about 30 years. I was the interim Infectious Disease Laboratory manager for over a year during the COVID-19 response.
“I remember in early March 2020, I was going out of town with some buddies for a weekend and COVID-19 was starting to ramp up, and basically the world shut down that weekend. I came back on Sunday and immediately went into work. At that time, the Department of Health was the only laboratory doing COVID-19 testing in the state, so we were getting absolutely crushed with specimens like we'd never been before.
“We had tons of people here on a Sunday just trying to get them into the door, get them logged into our computer system, and start the testing process. That was how it was for four weeks. We were never really prepared for that volume of testing, so we had to pivot on how we did our work and try to put essentially all the focus on to how to do COVID-19 testing. At the time we were just trying to get through the day and make sure that we were able to do the work as much as we could. That was challenging.
“It was a weird time, because not only was your work life being thrown upside down and you had to completely refocus what you were doing and what your priorities were and how to communicate with people and all that stuff, but your whole life was that way. Everything, normal stuff that happens – concerts, sporting things, events – everything got canceled. It was a really overwhelming time. You were just inundated with COVID-19 everywhere you went, whether it was on the news, at work, or even when you ran into people, they would be asking you about COVID-19.
“It I felt like I lived a whole year of only COVID-19. It was 24/7. It was putting your nose to the grindstone and doing what you needed to do to get through the day, and hopefully at the end of the day, you thought about how you could have done things better and tried to improve the process, and then started over the next day.
“I am at a time in my life where our kids are grown adults, so they didn't necessarily need me to be a hands-on dad to them at that point. There was a time where my wife took care of everything, any of the stuff that needs to happen to run a house. It created space for me to really focus on what I needed to focus on, but then also gave me a break so that I could recover as much as I could each day.
“One of the things that the supervisors did for at least the first year or so was call all the people with positive results from the lab, and those supervisors would be the last ones to leave at the end of the day. You knew you were going to be there late, until seven or nine or even later, depending on the day where we were in the pandemic. I remember it would get to 5:00, and the lab would start to thin out and then by 5:30 or 6:00 I would just crank my music up. There were a couple albums that I loved, and I would play them all the time. Some of them were happy ones, but there's a couple songs that were my angry songs, and I still play those.
“My kids know exactly which songs are my angry songs … Limp Bizkit’s song ‘Break Stuff’ was my go-to rage song. The album I probably listened to most was by The Beths. And I can’t forget the best – Nur-D. Then I started listening to some Etta James at the same time. And then Durry, of course. I can't forget my Durry!
“I think it was such an acute experience, especially those first three months, that I was just focusing on finding the problem, solving the problem, moving on to the next problem, working together to do everything that had to happen for the testing to occur. There was a lot of training, to make sure that we had enough people to do certain things, moving people around. Over time we were able to build a better machine, but it took so much work.
“I was just so thankful for how many people kept stepping up for months and years. You know, it's easy to do your job for a week or a couple of weeks, but when you're really in it, that's a whole different thing. There were rough patches, but people stuck together. We had each other's backs, and I'm really proud of that. There's a lot of things that the public doesn’t understand about went on here and the really devastating toll that it took on the people that were working on the front lines. I work in public health. This is what we do. Hopefully you don't have to work on a pandemic in your career, but it's the job. We do this because we think it's important work, and we think it's important to work on behalf of our fellow citizens.
“You're hoping that the work that you do is impactful. And if a pandemic happens again, I will volunteer to do whatever it takes to help. If I'm going to be involved with public health, I'm not going to shy away from that, even though it would be really tough.”
PHL COVID-19 Stories is a series about the experiences of Public Health Lab employees during the COVID-19 pandemic.