Health Department Employees Recall Response To Pandemic
The two-year long COVID-19 pandemic has required the staff of the Tuscarawas County Health Department to demonstrate resilience and adaptability as they have dealt with a disease that has claimed the lives of at least 488 county residents and sickened more than 20,000.
"I think for all of us, not only those in public health, we definitely did not anticipate that it would last this long," Health Commissioner Katie Seward said. "We knew that it would be a marathon and not a sprint, but it's been like an ultra marathon."
Staff members worked long hours handling pandemic-related duties, all the while continuing to provide essential services such as food safety inspections, well and septic inspections and medical services for county residents and WIC (Women, Infant and Children) program clients.
The T-R talked to several health department employees about their experience over the last two years. Here is what they had to say:
Jennifer Demuth, director of promotion and community relations for the agency, joined the health department just months before the pandemic began.
Once the first COVID-19 cases were diagnosed in Ohio in March 2020, the large conference room at the health department was turned into an emergency operations center.
"It was really impressive to me to see how everyone came together in such a good way," Demuth said.
She noted that there was not a single staff member who wasn't involved in some way in the agency's COVID response. Those who weren't directly involved made sure everything else was taken care of.
"It was just so impressive to see that. It makes you feel good about having joined that organization," she said.
At times, it was also rough.
"At first everyone was so grateful for information," she said. "As the pandemic seemed to go on and on, then we had people say, quit telling us. You're trying to scare us, which in truth was never what we wanted to do. That was challenging, because I'm like most people here. We just like to help people."
Sometimes, Demuth was called in to help with contract tracing calls.
"I had times where I had to tell a parent, your child won't be eligible to play in a ballgame. That's hard information to give. Some folks are very understanding, and some folks were understandably upset and let us know. Those times are very disheartening because you're just doing your job and you're just trying to follow the mandates that were set, not by us, but by the Ohio Department of Health."
Some days were good, others not so much during the pandemic.
"The community would send cards," Demuth said. "We would get thank yous from people on the phone, too. They'd drop off cookies. All of those things seemed to come really at the right time.
"There were days I would have to put out the death notices. There were days, especially in December 2020 when we had eight death notices in one day, when it was just devastating because every time I would put one up I would think, that's somebody's family that now has a hole.
"You wish that person could have been saved. It's saddening, but it always worked out that when we had days like that, someone would show up with cookies or the next phone call you took, someone would say, oh thank you so much."
Amy Kaser, the health department director of nursing, had to balance her normal duties with those of dealing with COVID-19 during the pandemic.
She and other members of the staff worked 12 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays, at the office on E. Iron Avenue.
Health department employees would get calls from laboratories when a positive COVID-19 test result was found. They would take turns taking the on-call phone, nicknamed Precious, home with them, and calls would come in at 10 p.m., midnight or even 2 a.m. Then they would have to get up at 6 a.m. to be at work at 7.
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