One Year Later: Doctor, Kane health dept. employee reflect on the COVID-19 pandemic

GENEVA – As soon as he learned that the new respiratory virus found in Wuhan, China had begun spreading across that country last January, Dr. Jay Liu, an infectious disease physician at Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital, began to worry.

“I remember hearing about it early, and not knowing how bad it would be,” he said. “Once it moved beyond that one province in China, infectious disease doctors were getting ready for it to come here. This is what we train for and what we do. There was a sense of purpose fulfilled – not that I would wish this on anyone – but this is what we train for. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future and we didn’t know much about it.”

This week marks one year since the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in Kane County and about one year since Gov. JB Pritzker closed schools and issued a stay-at-home order.

Liu recalled feeling like a young doctor when the pandemic hit, as he was learning new things all over again. He described the initial days of the pandemic as being “intense,” while new, and sometimes contradicting, information came out almost every day.

“One memory I have is sitting at the hospital and thinking, ‘in terms of this virus, I’ve gone back to an intern again,’ meaning that you have to spend a lot more time staring at data that normally would make sense,” he explained. “We were literally ‘practicing’ medicine because we were learning by doing. The recommendations were changing every week. That evolved into a recognition that this is here for the long term. It’s a marathon and not a sprint.”

He said that while he never felt a sense of panic or fear, the pandemic began to feel slightly less intense as he learned more about the virus and how to help patients.

“Once that shift in perspective occurred, we got a handle on things that may or may not work in the hospital, and worked on things like social distancing to stop the spread,” he said. “We went from knowing almost nothing about this [virus] to potentially having a tool to end or reduce the effect of the pandemic. We’ve come incredibly far, with rapid scientific development driven from research and industry. I think the rate of innovation is extremely impressive.”

While the COVID-19 pandemic is unlike anything he’s ever seen in the U.S., Liu likened it to the HIV epidemic of the early 1980s. He said when that virus hit, doctors didn’t know what it was, or why it was killing everyone who got it.

“People were coming into hospitals and dying for unknown reasons,” he explained. “Some older doctors remember that there was the same level of misinformation, but there wasn’t the infrastructure [like social media] to spread it. HIV isn’t spread as easily [as COVID], but it was certainly deadly. This [COVID-19 pandemic] is one of the few pandemics to affect the industrialized world. COVID has some characteristics of the perfect pandemic- it doesn’t kill the host fast enough, so it spreads, and it was able to spread asymptomatically.”

Liu said he and some of his colleagues have felt a rollercoaster of emotions over the past year, as they vacillated between feelings of hope and despair.

“We went through cycles of hope and frustration with the general public,” he explained. “A [doctor] friend categorized COVID as a stress test for the country, and he said he’s not sure we passed. I think a lot of us think we as a society failed to understand the severity of the illness. The frustration, from a health care perspective, is that people weren’t masking or social distancing. I felt like the public didn’t have the will to do what it took to limit the spread. I think the second surge [in the fall] was more disheartening, as we knew there were strategies to limit [the spread].”

There were a few bright spots, however. Liu said that even though there was a lot of frustration, there were clear moments of heroism.

“Look at the lab techs, the janitors in the hospital, nurses – who are in the patient rooms more than doctors – those are examples of people rising to the occasion,” he said. “And they did so without knowing what kind of danger they were in. They took care of patients anyway, and that was impressive.”

Uche Onwuta, director of health protection at the Kane County Health Department, and her team began ramping up preparations for a possible pandemic in January after learning of the first cases reported in Illinois.

“After the first [confirmed case in Kane County] in March, we were worried about testing. Providers who needed to test patients needed authorization from us, so we were working 24 hours a day,” she said. “And then contact tracing was huge as we started to have outbreaks. We had to train our staff on how to do contact tracing – everyone in the health department was trained. We shut down non-essential programs because the only thing we were concentrating on was COVID.”

There were 289 COVID-19 outbreaks across Kane County in 2020 that all had to be investigated, Onwuta said. But once people could get tested without the health department’s authorization, things got a little easier for Onwuta and the rest of the staff.

She commends everyone at the health department for all their hard work over the past year, reflecting on much they’ve learned.

“I think [the health department] did a good job with contact tracing from where we started- not knowing anything about the outbreak. We were able to quickly pivot and get things done,” she said. “The guidance was changing by the minute and I really appreciate out staff because this was a huge undertaking. [The pandemic] is the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime, and I can’t imagine anything bigger than this.”

And now, there is more optimism with the arrival of the vaccines. Liu described it as a “light at the end of the tunnel,” even though the pandemic is not over yet.

“We started seeing the end in sight. I’m not making any predictions, but the vaccine is the game changer, even though therapeutics are still in development,” he said. “I don’t feel outside of it yet. The pandemic has drastically changed society, but I’m still focused on being in it. There are still a lot of unknowns, as the virus is mutating.”

Onwuta is also feeling more hopeful, especially with warmer weather on the horizon.

“COVID, similar to other coronaviruses, doesn’t do well in the summer, so I’m hoping with incidence trending down now that when summer comes, we can continue that trend,” she said. “But I am also trying to be cautious because with the variants out there, things might change and we have to be ready.”

While Liu isn’t ready to predict when the end of the pandemic will come, he said he doesn’t think the public will have to “wear masks forever.”

“At some point we’ll have enough immunity where even if you get COVID-19, it’s not so bad,” he said.