Rachel's Series: Interview with DCHD's Janna Walker
It’s hard to believe two years have passed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the constant encouragement of being vaccinated and boosted, in addition to public places operating steadily once again, it’s easy to think society has finally gone back to normal after so long. It should be just as easy to remember who is to thank for the development of effective pandemic fighting technology and technique: healthcare workers.
Healthcare workers are everyday heroes. They fight right alongside “typical” essential workers who tend to be more well-known as essential to the public. These people include, but are not limited to, police officers, doctors, firefighters. All of these professions have faced some of the toughest challenges of all brought to them during the pandemic, and they have fought in a two-year battle to provide safety to everyday civilians. This battle is still being fought but in a much safer and more controllable environment. We have our healthcare workers to thank for tirelessly seeking answers to the rapidly growing health concerns of the pandemic, in addition to putting their lives on the line.
It is important to recognize what the healthcare department had to deal with in the beginning, in the midst and the seeming aftermath of the pandemic. When COVID-19 attempted to put these workers out of jobs, they worked harder, even through the constant sickness that surrounds them, to this day.
“This seems like a lifetime ago,” Janna Walker, a public health strategist and public information officer for the Davidson County Health Department, admitted. “When we first learned about COVID-19 in early 2020, we didn’t know very much, other than this was a novel Coronavirus [new] that had been identified in Wuhan, China in late 2019. We were hearing reports from other countries that the virus was spreading rapidly and that individuals with COVID-19 were experiencing extreme respiratory illness, hospitals were becoming overloaded and deaths were occurring. By the end of February 2020, COVID-19 was the only topic of conversation and new developments were rapidly evolving. It was overwhelming.”
Walker recalled the time that has passed since the start of the pandemic. “TWO YEARS, wow. But truthfully, that isn’t a very long amount of time when you think about it. On March 19, 2020, we had our first confirmed case of COVID-19 in Davidson County. In the time since then we have seen recommendations to wear a mask, COVID-19 tests evolve to where you can even test yourself at home, we have seen the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines, and we have seen the development of COVID-19 therapeutics to treat individuals with severe illness.”
COVID-19 made itself known to Davidson County, just one day before the nation practically shut down due to the pandemic. The health department recognized the need for protection in this time of crisis, and these workers refused to let a disease keep them from working.
“Pandemic or not, we train and prepare for these situations as part of our work,” Walker explained. “It is written in our job descriptions that we are a first responder agency for natural disasters, naturally occurring infectious disease outbreaks and other events that may impact the health and safety of Davidson County. Emergency Preparedness helps Public Health be ready, we practice different scenarios and work with Emergency Management and other community partners to have plans in place if we need them. Practicing versus actually living it, was different, but not foreign. Early in the pandemic, it was about taking in as much information as possible, turning that into something the public would understand and to not cause mass panic.”
As Walker outlined, it is written in her job description, along with her coworkers’, to serve as first responders for emergency situations that could threaten the health and safety of Davidson County citizens. The COVID-19 pandemic was not the first time the Davidson County Health Department had to deal with the widespread outbreak of a disease. While the health department may be familiar with handling this kind of situation, living through the constant spread of COVID-19 is a bit of a different story, as Walker mentioned. Especially in the beginning of 2020, the workplace would become a battleground of a sort for many working- class citizens.
“Work was a little unnerving and sometimes it was just scary,” Walker recalled. “The perspective was different looking from the inside out and knowing what was possible because we were seeing it in other places around the world. In March 2020, everything changed for many professions, schools were shut down, restaurants and businesses closed, some industries began working from home, but public health, public safety and healthcare still had to ‘go into the office.’ The thought of bringing this virus home to my family, who was sheltering-in-place, was terrifying at times. While our public health message from the beginning emphasized social distancing and not gathering with anyone outside of your household, our department continued to work in close proximity to the citizens in our community to do COVID-19 testing. Our team took extreme precautions with PPE [personal protective equipment], as not to expose ourselves to COVID-19. As COVID-19 evolved over time, it demanded more hands-on deck from our staff. At some point or another every employee at the Davidson County Health Department had to step away from their normal job duties to assist with COVID-19 response, such as vaccine clinics. During COVID-19 vaccine rollout, we hosted mass vaccination clinics at the Davidson-Davie Community College, where we would see over 1,000 people a day and simultaneously held smaller vaccine clinics at our office. It took our whole staff and the village of volunteers from our community to make it work and great leadership.”
In a time when the workplace sometimes felt like nothing but stressful and dangerous, teamwork was the answer to this seemingly hopelessness. The health department couldn’t interact with each other without being constantly exposed to disease, and still can’t today, in some ways. At the beginning of the pandemic, it was so easy to feel alone, even with people around. While nobody wanted to be alone, it was definitely for the best at first, for the sake of keeping others safe. At the end of the day, teamwork would be what would keep coworkers sane, making the workload easier to manage in such a tough time. Overall, teamwork would make the workplace feel like the workplace again.
Even with the health department working together as much as they could, there was still lots to do. It seemed like there was more work to do than workers available, for many jobs in general. Typical workplace tasks such as answering phone calls seemed to be piling up by the day, because of typical in-person interaction and business meetings being limited severely by COVID-19.
“I would feel comfortable saying I personally answered hundreds of phone calls,” Walker stated confidently. “Very early on in the pandemic when Davidson County was in a state of emergency, we opened a phoneline for COVID-19 calls for the community. Even though we are no longer in that state of emergency locally, the phoneline has been staffed in some capacity for over two years now. I feel confident we have taken hundreds of thousands or maybe over a million phone calls directly related to the pandemic in some way.”
Each member of the Davidson County Health Department has felt a whirlwind of emotions while working through the pandemic. COVID-19 has taken an emotional toll on everyone, especially those who encounter the disease daily in the workplace.
“I would compare this to the Five Stages of Grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance – but not in that order or in any order actually,” Walker offered in regards to the range of emotions COVID-19 made her feel, along with her employees.
“For most people, I think they have felt all of these emotions and then some. We have seen our families, friends, neighbors, coworkers, etc. all experience different feelings about the pandemic at different times. The pandemic has been a rollercoaster for most people, especially the impact of shutdowns, isolation or quarantine and how that affects their personal day-to-day lives.”
After two years following the start of the pandemic, vaccinations that are effective against warding off COVID-19 are readily accessible. There are hundreds of brave men and women who make up the Davidson County Health Department, along with Davidson County’s population of essential workers, to thank for getting North Carolinians to this point. Among those is Janna Walker; she puts all that she can into ensuring the safety and well-being for the community around her. The world is already filled with enough uncertainty and danger. These people work to make society feel a sense of safety, regardless of where they are. Kindly never forget the work that goes behind our safety, and we should never, for one second, be ungrateful. From the bottom of our hearts, as a community, thank you for all that you do, healthcare and essential workers.
