Public Health Lab
COVID-19 Stories: Anna

“I’m Anna, I am the Infectious Disease Lab manager here at the Department of Health. I oversee the Infectious Disease Lab, making sure that all of the units are able to do what they need to do, that the managers have the resources that they need, and that everybody else can do their job and continue to get testing done.

“My experience with COVID began in December of 2019, when we started hearing that there was something going on. We started talking about it in earnest more in January of 2020 but we were still waiting to hear what was going to happen from the CDC.  There were a lot of questions; there was this big unknown. I wasn't here at the Department of Health when they went through influenza in 2009, that whole big pandemic, so I didn't really have any experience with what that was like, but I'd been through flu seasons.

“I do feel like, in many ways, there is a lack of understanding of just how much we had to do as essential workers. And not just us. I think anybody that was working during the pandemic and had to continue to come in, there was not really an understanding of how exhausting it was, in so many ways. And that's the thing; being an essential worker allowed us to come in to work, and in some ways, didn't allow us to feel like we could step back, because we were essential. You felt like you were doing an important thing, but there also was a level of guilt in some ways. I mean, I had family members that were not considered essential, so they lost their jobs. A lot of people lost their jobs.

“My husband and I are entering that stage where our kids are starting to head off to college, so I think about how this pandemic impacts them. During some of their really important, formative years, things got disrupted, and they didn't get to do things the way that they normally would have. My daughter was a freshman in high school during that fall of 2020, which impacted a lot of her ability to integrate into that next phase of her life, so now I'm trying to help her get beyond that phase.”

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