The Longest Year

 Most of this post won't be about my horses, so sorry!

My attempt to find peace in 2020. Stayed at a cabin on a lake.

My day to day gig is as a hospital microbiologist. I was inspired by L. William's One Year in a Pandemic post and wanted to share some incredible things.

I was cleaning off my administrative desk a couple weeks ago and pulled down a notification bulletin from the state laboratory that I had dated to January 22nd. That was the first time that I had made notice of the novel Coronavirus. I had printed out the bulletin, hung it on my push board, and carried on like normal. Within a couple of weeks, I realized that I needed to make additional preparations. Like many hospital laboratory staff, I began attending webinars, started trying to gather supplies while being swept under in a wicked influenza season. My staff and myself were being overwhelmed by the volume of influenza testing and the escalating positivity rates.

One of the first confirmed positive cases in the country arose in a county nearby. At this point, I had implemented fairly aggressive cleaning and preparation practices in the laboratory. We had PPE, but almost no swabs to collect specimens. Ironically, as China and then Italy shut down, the precious viral nasopharyngeal swabs and viral transport media was no longer being produced. How was it that the countries that made these items were being most affected?

Every single swab would be accounted for and daily inventory taken for more than the next year. Every request logged so I could ensure there wasn't hoarding or inappropriate usage. I didn't realize that I would end up being the keeper of all testing and supplies in short order.

The second week of March 2020, things became very difficult. Hours of paperwork and samples were pouring in. I did not yet have testing in my laboratory and everything had to be funneled to the state. Every result was called. At times, various references laboratories opened testing and within days, would be swamped and shut down again. The phones never stopped ringing. Each day, counting swabs, controlling inventory, and trying to play referee in a game I never imagined.

My state then entered into a safer at home order in the middle of March. What happened next I never expected. We had been battling two fights: one with nCOV-2 (now named SARS-CoV-2) and one with influenza. The side-effect from the order was that influenza spread dropped dramatically. Testing decreased and supplies could finally be adjusted towards declared pandemic.

Mid-April, I was able to bring testing in-house. Safer for the staff who continued to soldier on, seeing a crushing amount of patients. I have never brought a test online in less than twenty-four hours. I wrote almost sixty pages of documents to bring this test in. Every test in a laboratory has to be validated, have samples run, a plan, a procedure, training, and so on. It was an incredible rush, but we are feeling exhausted.

I had originally planned on visiting family in May, but that vacation time was rescinded. While I had initially been hopeful that people would continue to hunker down, it became clear that something else much more sinister was lurking under the surface.

People died. I wish I could share their stories. I'm just a microbiologist, but I know their names. I have some of the specimens forever frozen, others sent for genetic sequencing and surveillance.

I did find some time outdoors in October

I realized about this time in May that things were not going to quiet down the way that so many scientists had hoped. I had the sinking feeling we had tipped past the point of no return...

Time to gather my feelings for the second half of the year.