Public Health Lab
COVID-19 Stories: Vicki

“My name is Vicki, and I have been working at MDH in the Infectious Disease Lab for 19 years. I am currently the Infectious Disease Lab operations supervisor. The Operations Unit’s primary function is to receive, review and order testing for all specimens coming into the Infectious Disease Lab.  

“Those first couple of weeks of the pandemic, we were just trying to figure out what we needed to do and how we were going to do it. The Public Health Lab staff still had to come to work, work together and hope we wouldn’t get sick. If a staff member did get sick, the initial CDC guidelines were a 14-day quarantine period, along with those considered contact exposures. One sick staff member could remove another two or three people from work due to contact exposure. For this reason, we prioritized cross-training. All staff needed to be trained in more than one area of the testing workflow. We were constantly pivoting job responsibilities as people got sick.  

“One of the many important outcomes from the pandemic was that we learned we have a lot of talent across the laboratory sections to enable cross-training in multiple areas. Most often an emergency response would require us to pivot again, establish new workflows and make sure we are capturing the most relevant data.  

“For a public health emergency, you can be planned, practiced, and prepared for an event, but it never is the same, and always feels reactionary. Once people started getting vaccinated in January and February of 2021, it felt like we could finally take a breath. I was holding my breath for months, hoping illness prevalence would start dropping and the public would start doing their job and get vaccinated.

“I have been here a while, and our first pandemic was the Influenza H1N1 in 2009. That was nothing in comparison to SARS-CoV-2. It may be hard to understand, but these events get me excited; it’s time to kick into high gear, to learn, be creative, be investigative and to understand. I've always wanted to do science and being in the public health field solidifies it even more. Public health means working for the health of the public. We try to communicate effectively, provide scientific background, and give educational reasoning to any public health event.

“I learned from others how to cope with high-level stress. Most public health outbreak events can be stressful, but the SARS CoV-2 pandemic took it to a new level. To keep myself and my co-workers going day after day, test after test, we had to learn to stop, take a breath, wait five seconds, and take another deep breath before responding. And we needed to keep each other in check; our work is important.  

“We are behind the scenes, not out front, but always protecting [Minnesotans]. We perform statewide infectious disease surveillance, investigate foodborne outbreaks, contribute data to the CDC for annual flu vaccine production. Our work impacts the daily lives of Minnesotans. We run with the knowledge we have, we implement, we change, we alternate. Public health is what it is: the health of the public. Everybody needs to participate and practice it.  

“I'm very thankful to the entire staff at the Infectious Disease Lab. We were a great team, with unwavering support and success. We made it to the other side.”

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