For one medical examiner, virus hit her county, then her family
The pandemic was a faraway nightmare — a catastrophe on the coasts — when Patty Schachtner, the medical examiner in St. Croix County, Wisconsin, began preparing.
In March, she counted up all of her county’s hospitals, ventilators and nursing homes, including the one where her beloved 88-year-old father lived. If the coronavirus reached this mostly rural place on Wisconsin’s western edge, would residents be ready? She had spent 31 years working in public health — the last nine as the county’s chief medical examiner — but she could not be sure. So she kept going.
She delivered masks to funeral homes, hoping they would help protect the staff from the virus and slow its spread. She installed showers in an unused warehouse for sheriff’s deputies and other front line workers who might need to clean off before heading home to their families.
And in the grim chance that the virus did come and that there were more deaths than the county could handle, she dropped off body bags at nursing homes. Part of the warehouse was turned into a morgue.
Even this might not be enough, she knew — not with a team of five death investigators to cover a county of more than 700 square miles. So she did what few other medical examiners were doing and rented a refrigerated truck to store even more bodies.
“I pray that I never have to use it,” Schachtner, who also is a state senator, said in March. “But this COVID can get out of control really quick.”
And all summer long, the coronavirus barely rose above a trickle in St. Croix County. Then came fall.
Now dozens of her neighbors in the county are contracting the virus each day. The local health department has abandoned efforts to contain the spread with contact tracing, saying it is too busy simply notifying all the people who test positive. The nightmare scenario unfolded not just for the county, but for Schachtner. In October, her sister-in-law got it — then, in quick succession, her brother-in-law and her sister. And her father.
The outbreak in Wisconsin spiraled beyond control weeks ago, with rates of new cases that are consistently among the country’s worst. Tests are often scarce, the governor has begged people to stay home, and all but one of Wisconsin’s 72 counties faced “critically high” case activity Thursday, the state’s highest level of concern.
When the pandemic took hold in March, Schachtner already had a wide network of connections in public health — people who were thinking the same thing she was: What can we do to protect the community?
But in St. Croix County, a mostly conservative area that President Donald Trump won decisively in 2016 and 2020, Schachtner endured some criticism about the refrigerated truck, which mostly stood empty. Schachtner’s role as appointed medical examiner is nonpartisan, but she won her seat in the state Senate as a Democrat in a low-turnout special election in 2018.
“I got it from both sides,” she said of the refrigerated truck. “I mean, some people thought it was overreacting, and other people were very grateful.”
There was public resistance to masks, social distancing and a stay-at-home order from Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, from the beginning. As more people in St. Croix County became sick his fall, Schachtner was struggling with the demands on her staff. The five death investigators now work 12-hour shifts four days a week and spend 36 hours a week on backup.
Her own state Senate reelection bid was coming up in November, but Schachtner did not hold campaign events or knock on doors, worried that it was not a safe practice; her Republican opponent won easily.
Then the virus reached her own family. Schachtner’s sister-in-law took a routine coronavirus test that came back positive. In the following weeks, more family followed: a brother-in-law, a sister and a niece who was an aide in the nursing home where her father, Richard Rivard, lived.
This month, her father tested positive. When he died the morning of Nov. 14, Schachtner huddled outside his window with her siblings in the cold, peering at their father one last time through the glass. “He was not supposed to die from COVID,” she said. “He was supposed to die from something else.”