Latest / Culture Positive: An Infection Prevention Podcast / The Year was 2020
Transcript
- Ally: Welcome to Culture Positive, an infection prevention podcast where healthcare, public health, and real life meet. I'm Allie, and by day I work in infection prevention at an academic hospital, bringing my background in epidemiology and public health into everyday practice. Each week, We'll dive into healthcare stories, public health conversations, workplace realities, and the human side of this work. This is a space for curiosity, honesty, and hopefully some inspiration. I'm glad you're here. There has been a lot in the news recently regarding public health and healthcare. It can become exhausting and draining to open any news source and see what the latest headlines are. The Cyclospore outbreak of 2026 has infected thousands and also contributed to the death of a few individuals. Measles is on the rise before the school year starts, and there's a massive outbreak of Ebola in the DRC. Even with these headlines, public health and healthcare professionals continue to show up and do their best to protect those they love and those they will never meet. This past week, one of our brightest public health and healthcare professionals was berated for their work and unwavering leadership in the COVID-19 pandemic. On august sixth, twenty twenty six, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress. Just a few days earlier, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on CNN and talked about how ICU beds were empty during COVID. And specifically said our largest city in the United States, New York City, had empty ICUs in the height of COVID-19. That statement was particularly difficult for me to hear because I remember what was happening. In March 2020, FEMA deployed 85 refrigerated trucks to New York City to serve as temporary morgues. Because the city's existing morgue capacity was being overwhelmed by the number of people dying from COVID-19. COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death in the United States between March 2020 and October 2021. These aren't abstract statistics to me. And maybe that's why this past week has affected me so deeply. It made me realize I still have a lot to work through from my own experience working during the COVID-19 pandemic. I was an essential worker, an infectious disease epidemiologist, working behind the scenes during One of the most frightening and chaotic periods in modern public health. When I first thought about launching this podcast, one of the things I knew I wanted to do was share the human side of working in public health and healthcare. Behind every outbreak investigation, every case count, every surveillance report, and every recommendation, there are people. Throughout my career, I have been amazed by the resilience of the public health and healthcare professionals I have worked alongside and met. In light of some things that have been said in the news recently, I felt like it was time to share some of my own experiences and those of my colleagues who were part of the frontline response during the pandemic. I am so grateful to everyone who is willing to share their experiences, memories, and reflections. Some of these stories are difficult. Some are heartbreaking. Some are reminders of just how much people were carrying while they continued to show up for work and what they still carry. Let's get into it. March fifteenth, twenty twenty. At this point I had been working at the Massachusetts State Health Department for a little over a year. My title was Outbreak Pasty Coordinator, and my job involved preparing for and responding to infectious disease outbreaks. I was on vacation in Mexico with my mom, but even while I was away, I was receiving emails and texts from work. COVID-19 was an emerging pathogen that was beginning to cause concern and fear in the United States. there was more and more work happening around contact tracing, concerns about international travel, and potential outbreak investigations. But based on the types of questions and concerns I was receiving, COVID-19 felt different from any other pathogen or investigation I had studied or worked on before. I had this feeling in my gut that we were on the brink of something terrible. I remember hugging my mom at the Puerto Vallarta airport, knowing it might be a very long time before I could hug her again. And it was. It would be a long time before I could hug anyone. At the height of the pandemic, I was working 60 to 70 hours a week. I was investigating outbreaks, answering questions from the public, talking to healthcare workers, collecting and reporting data. I was trying to understand a virus that was changing by the day. There is one night in particular that I will never forget. I was woken up around 1 a.m. by a nurse manager at a long-term care facility. She was calling to report several deaths that had occurred that day. I stayed on the phone with her for about an hour. She was watching people die at a rate she had never experienced before. She was heartbroken, overwhelmed and scared. And in that moment, she didn't need me to have an answer. She just needed someone to listen. So I did. And then there was the other side of the pandemic. I remember speaking with a member of the public who screamed at me over the phone. They told me I was a devil worshiper and that I had blood on my hands because I worked at the State Health Department. I couldn't be with my family who lived in another state. I was constantly worried that my grandparents would get sick and that I wouldn't be able to see them before they died. There was confusion everywhere, there was sadness everywhere. There was death everywhere. I think what is interesting to me now, years later, is that almost no one has ever asked me what it was actually like to work on the COVID nineteen pandemic. People in public health and healthcare understand what that period was like, but outside of those fields, I don't think people fully understand what was happening behind the scenes. I don't share these stories because I want sympathy. This was my reality. And that's part of why years later, hearing someone deny the magnitude of COVID-19 affects me so deeply. Because I remember the nurse calling me at one in the morning. I remember the names of the deaths she was reporting. I remember the people screaming at me over the phone. I remember being afraid for my grandparents. I remember hugging my mom at the airport and wondering when I would be able to hug her again. I remember everything. Sometimes I think about COVID and wonder if people weren't working in healthcare will ever truly understand what it was like. Every shift started with putting on an N95, face shield, gown, and gloves, knowing you'd spend the next 12 hours hot, sweaty, thirsty, and trying not to think about whether you were bringing it home to your family. People were dying every day. Not every patient, but Enough that death became a regular part of the shift instead of an occasional one. Families couldn't always be there, so we spent a lot of time holding phones, explaining what was happening, or simply sitting with patients so they weren't alone. The people I worked with became my support system. We helped each other through difficult conversations, cover each other when someone needed a minute. And somehow still find something to laugh about before walking into the next room. You had to. Then I'd go home and my husband would ask me how my day was. He cared and he wanted to understand, but unless you worked in that environment, it's hard to explain what it feels like to see that much loss, and then come home and act like everything is normal. Another tough thing was hearing people say COVID wasn't real, or that hospitals were exaggerating what was happening. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but those comments were hard to hear after spending a shift watching patients struggle to breathe, calling families with updates, or seeing another room suddenly go quiet. COVID-19 changed healthcare, but it also changed the people who worked through it. We learned how resilient we could be, but we also carried home things we'll probably never fully put down. Most of us don't talk about it very often anymore, but I don't think any of us forgot it. My experience working in healthcare during COVID is drastically different than most. When COVID hit in March of 2020, I was working in a small two-room cath lab in Savannah, Georgia. We were a primary STEMI center, a STEMI being the most severe and dangerous type of heart attack But the majority of our cases were elective outpatient procedures. At the beginning, it was business as usual. But as things escalated, our workload drastically changed. Our elective procedures were canceled. Our days were usually full from seven to five, booked all day with cases, but now we maybe had three total cases a day. No one was coming to the hospital anymore for fear of catching COVID. It was eerily quiet. When a STEMI came in from the field, we were terrified. We had a door-to-balloon time goal of 90 minutes to meet and couldn't test patients for COVID. If we did, we didn't get results back until the case was over and the patient was already in recovery. Never in my career as a nurse have I been so scared to provide hands-on patient care than I was during that time. I feel guilty sometimes because I got lucky. Knowing what other nurses across the country had to go through is heartbreaking, I can't relate to the pain, the trauma, or the sacrifices they had to make during that time. I have tremendous respect for those healthcare workers and I hope that we never have to go through that again in this lifetime. Everyone experienced COVID-19 differently. sharing this perspective isn't meant to compete with anyone else's or diminish what they lived through. It's simply the story I know. I graduated nursing school in the middle of a pandemic. My final semesters happened through a computer screen. My transition into practice was accelerated. I entered a profession that was already fighting for its life. I had the privilege of learning from nurses who had spent 10, 15, sometimes 30 years at the bedside. People who could walk into a room and know something was wrong before the monitor ever sounded an alarm. They taught from experience that couldn't be found in a textbook. Then one by one they left. People often ask what it was like to start nursing during COVID. They expect stories about overflowing ICUs, ventilators, isolation gowns or patients saying goodbye through an iPad. Those stories matter, but they've been told. The story I keep coming back to is what happened after the shift ended. We would leave the hospital carrying things we couldn't explain, only to find ourselves in grocery stores. Family dinners or online conversations with people who genuinely didn't believe what we had just spent twelve hours living. It wasn't just indifference. It was disbelief. There is something uniquely disorienting about witnessing history while someone looks you in the eye and insists it isn't happening. Then, almost overnight we became heroes. People clapped. Companies ran commercials. Signs appeared in front yards. We were celebrated in a way that felt both sincere and strangely temporary. Because while the world hero was everywhere, the problems never changed. Staffing didn't magically improve, trauma wasn't processed, burnout wasn't treated. Calling someone a hero is often easier than asking what they need. Eventually, the applause stopped. The nurses who carried entire units through impossible years began leaving the bedside. Retirement came early for some. Others changed careers altogether. Some simply couldn't do it anymore. And when they left, they didn't just take a body out of the staffing matrix. They took decades of judgment, intuition, mentorship. And hard earned knowledge with them. That's the part of the pandemic I still think we're living through. Today's nursing workforce looks different, not because new nurses aren't capable, but because experience cannot be accelerated. The profession lost an extraordinary amount of institutional knowledge in an incredibly short period of time. Those who remain often find themselves doing the work of several people at once. while trying to teach the next generation everything the previous generation never had the chance to pass on. The pandemic didn't just change healthcare. It altered the people who kept showing up. Some of them are still here. Most don't talk about it. Not because they've forgotten, but because they've learned that unless you were there, it's almost impossible to explain. and after enough attempts, you stop trying. For our Huddle Corner, a section for some takeaways before signing off. I hope these stories were able to give you some perspective on the realities of COVID and the aftermath of it. COVID-19 wasn't just a headline. It wasn't just a number on a dashboard. For the people working in public health and healthcare, it was our everyday reality. It was people. It was fear. It was grief. It was exhausting. I want to thank everyone who shared their stories and insight on COVID. I hope that I am able to continue to use this platform to share the humanity behind working in public health and health care. Finally, to all the frontline workers, I see you. I value you. I respect you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Culture Positive. If you have any questions or ideas for an episode, please send me an email at CulturePositivePod at gmail.com. References for the episode can be found in the show notes. Infection prevention is about more than policies and protocols. It's about people. Until next time, stay curious, stay compassionate, and keep building a culture that's truly positive.