Public Health Lab
COVID-19 Stories: Sean

“My name is Sean and I currently serve as the Sequencing and Bioinformatics supervisor here at the Infectious Disease Lab in the Public Health Lab. What my unit did specifically at the beginning of the pandemic was help with the clinical testing, and we were responsible for the whole genomic sequencing of the SARS-CoV-2 virus for variant tracking purposes.

“Thinking back, my pandemic response did not start in March 2020, but actually in December 2019. I'm a first-generation immigrant, and my parents still live in China. My hometown is actually an hour and a half bullet train ride away from Wuhan. Back in 2019, when things got bad in China, I was trying to search for some masks to send back to my parents. That's my first impression of the pandemic. In terms of my feelings, I was anxious and worried, obviously, for my family in December 2019, and then I guess I was just so busy I didn't have time to examine myself and how I felt, basically the whole summer of 2020.

“I lead a team that was also one of the first public health labs who did SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequencing, which is now the gold standard for variant tracking. We had been doing that throughout 2020, and today we're still doing it. We’ve achieved a lot scientifically, from a public health perspective. We're the team who discovered the first Alpha variant in Minnesota. We’re the team who discovered the first Gamma variant in the United States. We're the team that discovered the second case of Omicron in the United States.

“One of the practices we came up with was to have the supervisors call the test submitters to confirm the people who tested positive. The supervisors would take rotations to call, and we oftentimes would work until 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. What was really devastating was when we would call the long-term health care facilities and they couldn't find the positive patients in their database, because it turned out that those people died that day. It's okay to do that once or twice, but when you take rotations and do that regularly … My partner picked me up one night, and I hopped in the car and I just started crying. That was hard, in terms of mentality.

“I think there's definitely some PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) out of the pandemic response, because it was more than a pandemic. A lot of things happened during that same time. There was a pandemic, civil unrest, hate towards the Asian population ... I am way less social now than before, and personality-wise, I'm more pessimistic. In terms of professionally, I think we're still trying to crawl out of the pandemic. I do have a passion for public health, and I can see the vital role public health plays in a pandemic response, so I guess that's part of the reason why I'm still here. I’m exhausted, but I'm still here.”

PHL COVID-19 Stories is a series about the experiences of Public Health Lab employees during the COVID-19 pandemic. These stories feature PHL employees as that’s where this project started, but everyone at MDH has a story. Contact Marie Valois if you’d like to share your story, at marie.valois.contractor@state.mn.us.