CLEARFIELD — Wendy Garcia has seen her share of trembling these past 12 months.
There was the woman who came to the Davis County Health Department offices in Clearfield last summer who had been exposed to COVID-19 and needed to be tested.
“She was physically shaking. She was just so frightened, so fearful, so afraid she was going to die,” remembers Wendy, a registered nurse who is the Davis County division director for family health and disease control.
That’s a bureaucratic way of saying she’s the person in charge of pandemics.
When the first case of COVID-19 was diagnosed in Utah, it was Wendy who took the call from the Utah Department of Health confirming that the infected person resided in her jurisdiction.
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Steve Griffin, Deseret News
“Congratulations, Davis County is the first county in Utah to have a COVID case,” she was informed.
It was 5:30 p.m. on March 6, 2020.
Quitting time. Supposedly. But no one went home that day until one the next morning.
It was just the beginning of 70-hour workweeks filled with testing, treating, contact tracing, quarantining, social distancing and, finally, vaccinating.
“It’s been a very difficult and tough year; I can say that with conviction,” says Wendy. “Just exhausting. Like being on the front lines at the battle field.”
That first case, of course, morphed into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, placing Wendy and her staff — which quickly grew from seven in the beginning to more than 70 at the pandemic’s height — at the tip of the spear, as it were.
To find out if you had it, or didn’t have it, and what you should do if you did or didn’t, you needed to talk to them.
Which brings us back to the trembling woman in the examination room last summer, a person so unnerved she could not control her body.
It didn’t help, Wendy adds, that she and her health department colleagues were dressed head to toe in gloves, masks, face shields and gowns — your basic hazmat suit.
“First thing we said was ‘Please don’t worry.’ We explained that what we were wearing was for her protection as well as ours. Then we talked about the procedure about to take place.”
If she were to test positive, it certainly didn’t mean she was going to die. The odds for a full recovery were very much on her side.
Wendy and her staff saw a lot of scared and fearful people like that over the past year. People who were imagining the worst; people who had to be talked in off the ledge.
A year later, she’s still seeing trembling.
But now it’s the good kind.
Just a few days ago, she was at the Davis County vaccination clinic when she saw a woman who was visibly shaking as she stood in line waiting for her shot.
“I went up to her and asked if she was OK,” says Wendy. “She said, ‘Oh, I’m not scared. I’m just so overwhelmed with joy and excitement that this day is finally here.’”
By no means is the COVID-19 threat over, Wendy quickly adds. “We know this is a disease that is going to be here forever. But with our vaccine and the intervention methods we’ve refined over the past year, we’re going to have more control over it going forward.”
Her workweeks are now in the 60-hour range, and dropping.
“We were seven days a week for a long time. Now we do not work on Sundays, so we’re making improvement,” she says, smiling.
“We have some wounds that need to heal, because it has been very, very hard. I know I prayed nightly asking for this to go away, it was just too much. But in the long run, now that you can look back, we all have grown as a result. We are better people in public health, we are better people as a community, we have better systems in place, we have an overall better response capability. I think whenever you go through things like this you often come out a little bruised and battered, but you also come out stronger than you ever realized you could be.”
from Deseret News https://ift.tt/2QIO1uR
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