As COVID-19 rages, man’s focus changes
Loretto Hospital employee scraps his dreams to help the West Side
As he welcomes people to a Loretto Hospital COVID testing tent on a windy, 21-degree morning, a shivering Johnathan Daniels knows one thing for certain: This was never the plan.
He never intended to be running a testing site in a Far West Side parking lot in the dead of winter, providing a free service to a neighborhood in dire need of it. He never envisioned himself recruiting people for medical trials or encouraging complete strangers to get vaccinated.
But when the pandemic hit, everything in Daniels’ world changed dramatically.
Including his dreams. “Funny how that works, isn’t it?” Daniel says, as he rubs his hands together for warmth that doesn’t come. “If you told me this two years ago, I never would have believed it. But I have no doubts that this is where I’m supposed to be.”
Without a comprehensive national strategy for battling the pandemic, safety net hospitals such as Loretto — medical centers that accept all patients regardless of their insurance status or ability to pay — have been forced to punch above their weight for nearly a year. And few at Loretto have stepped into ring with more enthusiasm than Daniels, a 25-year-old accounting department worker whose efforts have helped the hospital administer more than 22,000 COVID-19 tests in the past 10 months.
In addition to running Loretto’s COVID testing sites, he volunteered to lead the recruiting efforts for coronavirus treatment and vaccine trials. He’s also a member of the hospital’s newly formed vaccination scheduling team, which makes appointments for the roughly 180 slots available to eligible members of the public each day.
Daniels juggles these virus-related responsibilities as part of a 15-hour work day that also includes his regular duties such as managing the medical center’s social media and paying the hospital’s bills on a razor-thin budget.
“COVID is everyone’s job now, but not everyone reacted to this emergency the same way,” said Loretto President and CEO George Miller, who recently named Daniels the hospital’s 2020 employee of the year. “Jonathan tries to help every department in the hospital. His energy, his teamwork, his willingness to help — even when it has nothing to do with what he does — is just so impressive.”
Daniels accepted a position at Loretto in August 2019 after studying business management and marketing at Concordia University. The job initially was supposed to be a stopgap, a way to save some money until he could move to California and find work in the cutting-edge, deep-pocketed world of Big Tech.
Already familiar with the hospital because his mother has worked in administration there for years, he took a job as laboratory assistant running specimens and results throughout Loretto’s labyrinth-like corridors. He was promoted to the accounting department in March 2020, just as Chicago reported its first coronavirus cases.
Within weeks, COVID-19 tore through the Austin neighborhood, infecting and killing members of the predominantly Black community at a higher rate than the rest of the city.
On a daily, sometimes hourly, basis, Daniels bore witness to the deadly consequences that underserved Black communities have confronted for generations.
Despite his business school background and a queasiness around blood, Daniels offered to help out in the overwhelmed emergency department, where he kept an eye on patients when a doctor or nurse couldn’t be with them.
One night early in the pandemic, he watched a man who had been alert and talking just a short time before go into respiratory failure. Shaken by the man’s violent gasps for air, Daniels vowed to do something.
“That’s the moment things changed for me,” he said. “I just couldn’t sit back, look away and let it be someone else’s problem.”
Though still terrified by the possibility of contracting the virus at work, Daniels joined the hospital’s COVID-19 task force, raising his hand to supervise the testing program for employees at the Cook County Jail and juvenile detention center. His supervisor duties soon expanded to the testing tent in the Loretto parking lot, where he can be found most mornings.
Dressed in blue scrubs and winter coat, he now spends hours outside helping the staff with paperwork, monitoring capacity and running back inside for additional supplies. He also goes out of the way to make small talk with the patients as they wait, looking for any chance to turn the conversation toward the importance of vaccines and the need for participants in the hospital’s ongoing vaccine and antiviral trials.
Hesitancy, however, abounds in the Black community, where the country’s history of inhumane medical experiments such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study remains a wound unhealed. Daniels acknowledges the concerns as he explains the safety procedures that have been in place to ensure the informed consent of all patients and he stresses the need for people of color to participate so scientists have a better understanding of how medications and other treatments work in every patient.
He also mentions the perks: A $1,200 stipend, free medical care for two years and eventual vaccination if
given the placebo.
Should the person remain unconvinced, Daniels tries to land one last punch: If this drug works, he asks, why shouldn’t West Side residents get first crack at a new treatment?
“Why can’t Austin be first in line for something?” he asks. “We don’t always have to be last.”
Though Austin’s infection rates are nowhere near the devastating highs the neighborhood endured last spring, the community’s primary ZIP code last week had a higher positivity rate than the citywide total, public health data shows. It also has a higher infection rate, with 2 in every 1,000 people testing positive for the virus, about 20% higher than the citywide average.
About 1 in every 14 residents of Austin’s primary ZIP code has tested positive for the virus since the pandemic began, slightly better than the citywide average of 1 in every 12. However, the ZIP code’s death rate is significantly higher than the city average. One in every 430 people died from the virus in the past 10 months, compared with 1 in every 605 residents citywide, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health.
After several hours in the tent, Daniels heads back to his office and changes out of his scrubs. Once he’s put on a dress shirt and a bow tie, he looks at the color-coded to-do list on his dry erase board and gets to work.
He logs onto the hospital social media sites and promptly deletes posts involving conspiracy theories, misinformation about vaccines or accusations of COVID-19 being a hoax. He sends a private message to the person who posted and offers to share both scientific
research and his own experience as a vaccine recipient.
He usually gets a response. Sometimes he even gets someone to reconsider their position.
“He has a way of engaging with people that’s just incredible,” said Dr. Heather Bergdahl, Loretto’s chief transformational officer and Daniels’ boss. “He has such a powerful and important voice. We’re so lucky he’s willing to use it.”
As Daniels heads to get his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, he stops to tell fellow employees what he’s about to do and asks if they’ve signed up. About half of 600 Loretto’s employees live in Austin, so Daniels knows a greater overall hospital participation rate increases the neighborhood’s chances of blunting the virus.
When he finally sits in the chair for his shot, Daniels hands his phone to Bergdahl so she can record the moment. While waiting in the recovering room, he posts the video to his Instagram with a message encouraging his followers to get the shots as soon as they become eligible.
Daniels also confirms he no longer dreams of moving to California. He wants to stay at Loretto and fight for health care equality among Chicago’s underserved communities.
“I feel so many things right now. Relief and joy, for sure,” he says, touching the bandage that covers his injection point. “But I also feel like my work has just begun. If we can get Austin healthy, then the rest of Chicago will follow.”
This, he says, is the new plan.