Public health workers modest about sacrifices
Rebecca Edmonds, the county’s supervising Public Health nurse, estimated at one point last year she was working 12 to 14 hours a day for at least three weeks straight with
no days off when she was supposed to be on her honeymoon.
National Public Health Week, which ran from Monday through Sunday, is intended to recognize the efforts of people like Amelia Do-golden, Emily Hamilton, Rebecca Edmonds, Deborah Clark and Kristina Herrera, as well as scores of others who work in public health in Tuolumne County.
They all work for the Tuolumne County Public Health Department and like the rest of their co-workers, they’ve had to adjust, adapt, put in extra hours, work weekends, take on new responsibilities, and do it all with positive attitudes over the past year and more of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Do-golden and Hamilton both started their jobs with county Public Health last year during mid-summer coronavirus surges in Tuolumne County.
Do-golden’s job was supposed to be sharing information and educating people about dental health and assistance programs, while Hamilton was supposed to be with tobacco education and control. Because they started their jobs when cases began surging, they had to learn everything possible about their own jobs and the county’s COVID-19 response and protocols, contact tracing and case investigations.
“It was like they were doing two jobs at once, during the surges with 60 to 70 cases a day,” Herrera, a county Public Health programs supervisor,
said Thursday afternoon at a vaccine clinic staged outdoors at the Sierra Bible Church parking lots off Tuolumne Road. “They started in June and immediately got pulled into COVID response activities.”
The department had 25 to 30 employees around Halloween 2019, before anyone anywhere in the world ever heard of COVID-19.
Staffing at the department has since doubled to 60 employees due to exponentially increasing workloads dropped on every available employee over the past year, with about half of them hired as parttime disaster service workers.
They serve as relief staff to help ease the burdens continually falling on core county Public Health staff and their families, as they've coped with an ever-increasing avalanche of rapidly changing recommendations, protocols and edicts coming from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the California Department of Public Health.
Edmonds is the county's supervising public health nurse, and like Do-golden, Hamilton, Clark, Herrera, and other Tuolumne County Public Health employees, they are modest about sacrifices they've made throughout the pandemic and are reluctant to talk about the real grind they've faced at times to keep doing their jobs in the COVID era.
When asked about her sacrifices on Thursday, Edmonds relented some and allowed that, while she really can't remember because so much of the past year has been a blur, she estimated at one point last year she was working 12 to 14 hours a day for at least three weeks straight with no days off when she was supposed to be on her honeymoon.
“Sometimes I'd get a day off and I'd still be working at home, on the phone, on the internet,” Edmonds said. “Case investigations. Outbreak investigations. Last summer and last fall especially.”
Edmonds emphasized she is just one of a team of county public health workers who have had to rise to an initially unforeseen challenge, one that continued burgeoning into a fullblown public health emergency, a life-threatening pandemic that has contributed to the deaths of more than 560,000 Americans, including 58,000 Californians.
“We all miss time off and have to change our daily routines,” Edmonds said, downplaying her own sacrifices. “It's not just the big things like a honeymoon. It's the little things, like missing dinner each day with our families. Even when you get home, you're getting texts, calls, emails.”
Edmonds has been with county Public Health more than five years and she started her supervising public health nurse job a year ago, in mid-april 2020, right when COVID-19 recommendations and protocols were beginning to come down from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the state.
Clark was working as the department's vaccination group leader Thursday at the Sierra Bible Church clinic venue. Among her duties was keeping track of a high-tech Fridge-freeze cooler containing individual, boxed, vial doses of Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.
She estimated she had 1,400 doses on-site at the start of the day Thursday and, by 5:15 p.m., a crew of 65, including trafficflow volunteers, clinical staff, and medical professionals, had administered more than 1,100 doses. The portable, medical FridgeFreeze cooler allowed Clark to ensure no doses were wasted Thursday. The Fridge-freeze preserved all unused doses for use on another day.
Clark said Edmonds had to call her twice last year to convince her to come out of retirement to help at the department. She is a former public health nurse and a former corrections worker, and she is currently working about 20 hours a week as a relief nurse. She also works part-time for the COVID-19 testing contractor, LHI OptumServe, at the Mother Lode Fairgrounds in Sonora.
Clark said she recently had to cut short a birthday celebration on a day she was supposed to be off, but she wasn't complaining.
“It's been over a year, it feels like, since some of us had a day off,” Edmonds said. “But we do it for a reason. We got into public health before COVID because we're passionate about our work.”
“We knew what we were getting into,” Herrera said. “Nobody said it was going to be like this, but this is why we got into it — to help our community.”
Herrera is a Class of 2007 graduate of Summerville High School. She earned a degree in neurobiology and physiology at University of California, Davis, and her masters in public health remotely from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Her job before coronavirus hit was supervising county health education programs. These days, she wears a lot of different hats and takes on multiple responsibilities.
Herrera, too, emphasized she is not complaining. She loves her job and the challenges she has to deal with every day, even in the midst of the ongoing pandemic.
“There are days when I'm working on an outbreak at a school,” Herrera said. “I'll be on the phone with people, including superintendents. At the same time we're still running our education programs. I'm doing my normal work, and I'm also the fourth-string PIO (public information officer). We all do this work for a reason. I grew up here. We all live here in this community. We care about it, and that's why we do it.”
Herrera deflected attention from herself again and indicated some of the real workhorses who don't get recognized in the department are Rebecca Espino, the county Health and Human Services Agency director, Michelle Jachetta, the county Public Health director, and Dr. Eric Sergienko, the interim Tuolumne County health officer.
National Public Health Week was recognized Tuesday by the county Board of Supervisors. For more information about National Public Health Week, go online to www. nphw.org.