Public Health Lab
COVID-19 Stories: Jessica

“My name is Jessica. I am a science communications specialist here at MDH and the Public Health Laboratory. I've been with our Newborn Screening Program for about 13 years.

“I had just come back from maternity leave and I had been working for about two months, and then COVID happened. Our communications manager said in one of our first meetings, ‘This isn't a sprint, it's a marathon.’ We were still at that point thinking like a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, and we were very wrong. The problem in public health is everything's a marathon, but you have to go at a sprint speed. We would sprint and then get a small break, and then sprint, sprint, sprint. It was like that for three years, and it's exhausting, and there's a lot of burnout. I think that's the most shocking part: We thought this would be a couple of weeks. It's weird to come back. There are people here, but it's not like it was. You can walk up and down the hallways and not see anybody. It's so strange.

“I was worried about my family. My grandpa was in long term care at that point, and my grandma wasn't doing very well either. My dad and brother and cousin have Type 1 diabetes. My mom was working in the hospital. They're also in rural Minnesota, and they were saying things like, ‘We're thinking about not going to church anymore. Nobody up here is masking, nobody's doing anything.’ I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that is serious,’ because they are super Catholic, and suddenly they were thinking about not going to Mass. I was glad they did that. But that's when I think it really hit me. The place that used to be the most comforting place for them, outside of our house, was now a place where they could get really sick.

“I'm hoping people realize that public health has always been here. We don't just come out when there's an emergency or a pandemic. Public health is the reason you can brush your teeth or drink water from your tap safely. It's the reason that, if we know there's a foodborne outbreak going around, we have people who trace that and figure out what exactly made people sick as well as what needs to stop, what needs to be recalled, which restaurants need to do better with their handwashing practices, and so on. Babies were still getting screened during the pandemic; that didn't change.

“We were doing a lot of COVID stuff, but everything else that kept Minnesotans healthy was still happening, and it will always happen. It's not going away. We’re not going away.”

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.