Public Health Lab
COVID-19 Stories: Moe

“My name is Moe, and I worked for the Minnesota Department of Health for 29 years. At the time of COVID, I was working as the Emergency Preparedness and Response Unit Supervisor and had been in that job for many years.

“On March 6th, I remember we had Channel 11 in. I was giving them a tour, and we were in the hallway looking through the windows into the lab where someone was pulling results off. I could tell by the look she gave me that the first positive was on the run that she was analyzing. Right when Channel 11 was saying, ‘So have you had a positive yet?’ and I'm like, ‘No, we haven't.’

“Fast-forward to a couple of days later, once we had those first handful of positives: Things very quickly got overwhelming for all of us. I remember March 17, St. Patrick's Day, we got more than a thousand samples in one day. That first month of March, there was tons of stress. I think many of us were here from seven in the morning till 10 p.m. most days.  

“My staff did the results part of things, so they were the last ones in the building, and I really didn't want them to be here by themselves, so I always stayed, and we were literally the last ones out of the building. That spring was crazy. We were working seven days a week. On weekends, we had lunch brought in, and the lab staff would literally have five minutes to quick grab food and get back to work.

“I remember very early on we were working with a long-term care facility, and I ended up having to call the facility at about 11:30 p.m.. I had to give them results on about 27 positives of maybe 50 people, a very high percentage. The gentleman I was talking to just broke down in tears, sobbing. He was on his third shift. And they didn’t know the impact that this was going to have. There were elderly patients dying in the hallway. They just couldn't get them out of the facility fast enough. We just didn't have enough information on how to handle the outbreak in that population. No one did. That was very surreal to see that impact, and it was really important to me to get results out as quickly as possible, because of the public health implications and the contact tracing and all of that.  

“Our staff worked very, very hard to meet those timelines. But then fast forward for months and months and months of doing this, and it was hard on public health in general. I think all our states have felt the ramifications of this.”

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