COLUMBIA — Microbiologist John Bonaparte can count on one hand the days he has taken off from work since South Carolina recorded its first cases of the coronavirus in March 2020.
One of his co-workers in the state’s public health laboratory, Kendra Rembold, has missed three seasons of her children’s soccer games while pulling 12-hour shifts to keep up with the state’s unprecedented demand for COVID-19 testing.
And one of their supervisors in the Department of Health and Environmental Control’s cramped lab in Columbia, Christy Greenwood, decided she couldn’t adequately juggle the demands of the pandemic and her responsibilities as a single parent. So she took her 5- and 7-year-old children to stay at their grandmother’s house until things calmed down at work.
More than 550 days since the coronavirus took hold in South Carolina, that respite still hasn’t come for the hundreds of public health workers who toil in the background of the state’s response.
Lab technician Gregory Goodwin, microbiologist Kendra Rembold, Virology Supervisor Christy Greenwood, Microbiology Division Director Megan Davis, microbiologist John Bonaparte and lab worker Stephen Borthayre have worked long hours to keep up with unprecedented demand for COVID-19 testing at DHEC's public health laboratory. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Instead, they say, COVID-19 has proven to be an unending nightmare, serving up 12- and 15-hour shifts, seven-day workweeks and a buffet of anxiety, frustration and fatigue.
The Post and Courier spent time behind the scenes at DHEC and interviewed more than three dozen employees about their experiences during the pandemic. Their stories reveal how South Carolina’s collective failure to stifle COVID-19 has strained the very people who have sacrificed so much to help.
These DHEC health workers have scrambled for more than a year to set up testing sites, supply hospitals with protective gear, distribute doses of the vaccine and persuade everyday South Carolinians to take the life-saving shots.
Some have worked themselves to their breaking points, skipping birthdays, funerals, vacations and time with their families. A handful have been rushed to medical attention after suffering panic attacks or collapsing on the job from stress and exhaustion.
Like soldiers in a foxhole, they have banded together to lift each other’s spirits. But even that has been difficult as they watch the state’s tally of preventable COVID-19 deaths grow while their agency faces near-constant criticism for its handling of the pandemic.
Now, these beleaguered workers are staring down yet another surge of the virus that threatens to make their next 18 months on the job just as volatile as the last.
‘Worst week ever’
On a recent Wednesday morning, more than 20 people gathered around a quartet of wooden tables in DHEC’s drab Bull Street headquarters.
It was Day 542 of the pandemic in South Carolina, and DHEC’s COVID-19 command staff was settling down in this stuffy, windowless conference room for one of its triweekly meetings to coordinate the agency’s pandemic efforts.
Above the faint clicking of laptop keys, this makeshift grouping of epidemiologists, logistics wizards, data trackers, and public health experts briefed each other in rapid succession on the latest from the COVID-19 front.
DHEC Director of Planning David Harbison listens during a COVID-19 command staff meeting at the agency's Columbia headquarters. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
They heard that DHEC’s lawyers were keeping a close watch on arguments before the state Supreme Court over mask requirements at K-12 schools.
They learned that lawmakers had been asking questions about the lack of coronavirus testing in rural areas of the state, including Bamberg County, where one resident was told to wait six days for an appointment.
They were told hospitals across the state were running out of beds for COVID-19 patients. One of them, the Medical University of South Carolina, needed help securing 50 more ventilators from the federal government.
And they were warned the state’s low vaccination rate and the virus’ more contagious delta mutation were fueling a surge of new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
“We’re close to surpassing our worst week ever,” epidemiologist Dan Drociuk told the group.
Indeed, South Carolina would end the day with the highest rate of COVID-19 infections in the country, adding to a tally that now stands at 784,000 cases and 11,000 deaths.
As the meeting wrapped up, David Harbison, a fiery military veteran who has spearheaded the DHEC’s day-to-day COVID-19 operations, acknowledged the updates had been grim. But then, from his spot at the end of the table, Harbison offered some encouragement.
“You guys are absolutely busting your tails in every aspect of what we do,” Harbison told the team. “Keep up the good work. Don’t get frustrated. Let’s keep driving on.”
Exhausted
Driving on is all DHEC’s rank-and-file employees have done for months, often to the detriment of their personal lives and mental well-being.
Many had experience responding to all-hands-on-deck emergencies before, most often during hurricane season. But no one at DHEC can remember responding to an emergency longer than the 39 straight days they worked for hurricanes Florence and Michael in 2018.
The agency’s coronavirus response passed Day 39 in April 2020.
“To say we’re exhausted is an understatement,” said Whitney Cofield, an operations manager with emergency experience.
Many of DHEC’s public health workers are true believers in the agency’s mission. They have stuck around for years, even decades, in jobs that pay far less than they could make in the private sector.
But working under emergency conditions for more than a year has tested their resolve.
Employees in DHEC’s aging public health lab off Interstate 277 in Columbia, for instance, typically turn around about 5,000 tests a year. A handful of scientists check samples for measles, rabies and other sicknesses and contain outbreaks before they happen.
But over the past year, the lab has ramped up dramatically to conduct some 750,000 COVID-19 tests.
Lab technician Mitchell Landry analyzes Covid-19 test samples inside DHEC's public health laboratory in Columbia. The lab handles hundreds of samples per day. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
The lab added 20 rapid hires to the team. But workers still needed to sprint through their 12-hour shifts to keep up with demand, navigating hallways lined nearly floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes of testing kits and other supplies.
One of the new hires, a lab technician named Gregory Goodwin, who collects sneakers as a hobby, said he now only wears spongy Crocs when he gets home from work. They are easier on his tender feet after walking tens of thousands of steps each day.
Even on days when thousands of test samples poured into the lab, Goodwin and his co-workers simply stayed as long as necessary to keep lab turnaround times under 48 hours.
“The sheer volume was more than we could handle,” said Greenwood, the virology supervisor.
At a warehouse beside the Columbia lab, a handful of DHEC logistics specialists have spent the pandemic acquiring and distributing precious supplies to health care providers in every corner of the state.
The facility is home to shelves upon shelves of medical-grade masks, disinfectants and gloves — plus refrigerators stocked with the experimental COVID-19 treatment Remdesivir. And that’s just what’s left of the stockpile. Warehouse workers have already shipped out more than 1,600 gallons of hand sanitizer, 300,000 vaccines and 1.3 million COVID-19 test kits.
DHEC logistics specialist Scott Frost moves aside a ventilator in the agency's Columbia warehouse on Wednesday, Sept. 1, 2021. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
They can vividly recall the phone calls they got from irate health care administrators when vaccines first arrived in South Carolina but demand far exceeded supply. They remember long nights trying to figure out how to store and ship each brand of the vaccine at the required temperatures.
Now, there is plenty of vaccine to go around, but the warehouse staffers are again scrambling to get ventilators to hospital intensive care units.
“I’ve been dreaming about ventilators every night this week,” said Jamie Blair, interim director of DHEC’s Bureau of Public Health Preparedness.
Overstressed
In almost every facet of DHEC’s coronavirus response, employees have grown used to starting their workdays around 7 a.m. and finishing long after nightfall.
Marie Bevins, an internal planner, once worked 28 hours straight. She had been walking to her car in the parking lot around 7:30 p.m. after a long day when a supervisor called her back into work. She spent the rest of her marathon shift developing a model for allocating doses of the incoming vaccine.
“It’s all kind of a blur,” Bevins said.
The long hours and stress have overwhelmed some DHEC lifers.
Near the end of a particularly intense week in April 2020, the top attorney for DHEC’s public health division noticed his pulse skyrocketing. Will Britt couldn’t understand what was happening.
The 51-year-old was in excellent health, an avid runner with several marathons under his belt. He had never struggled with anxiety, even as a high-stakes trial lawyer before he joined DHEC.
Britt tried to calm himself down, pacing the halls of DHEC’s headquarters and listening to classical music. Nothing helped. His walk led him outside, and soon, he found himself lying in a flower bed, surrounded by colleagues who double as EMTs.
A service dog named Ziba sensed Britt’s distress and barked before curling up beside him. Britt tried, but failed, to get up.
“I’m going to die here at the agency,” he thought.
Ziba, a service dog, has helped employees in DHEC's Columbia warehouse cope with the stress and long hours that come with receiving and distributing COVID-19 supplies - including ventilators, vaccines and masks - across the state. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
A hospital trip and round of testing later, Britt learned he had suffered the first panic attack of his life. “Stress had gotten the better of me,” he said.
Several other DHEC workers have had similar episodes, brought on by physical fatigue, tight deadlines and a sense of responsibility for how their fellow South Carolinians fare during the pandemic.
“People feel like, if I don’t do my best, people could die,” said Ellen Andrews-Morgan, who works as a liaison between DHEC and state legislators.
DHEC’s executive director at the start of the pandemic endured his own stress-induced health ailments.
Rick Toomey, a former hospital administrator, was driving back from a meeting in Charleston on a Friday in March 2020 when he was struck with severe chest pain. He rushed to the nearby Medical University Hospital, where he learned his blood pressure had soared to nearly 200/140. Doctors were concerned he would have a stroke.
Toomey took a few weeks off to rest before jumping back into the fray. But then, one night in May after a hectic week securing emergency COVID-19 funding from the Legislature, Toomey felt his mind racing. He struggled to get comfortable in his Columbia apartment.
He measured his blood pressure with a portable cuff he had carried with him. It was again spiking. He was done.
Toomey resigned days later, not comfortable risking a stroke.
“After spending eight hours in (MUSC’s) chest pain center, it opened my eyes that I had a close call,” he said.
Missing out
Brannon Traxler remembers thinking she could use a break from the coronavirus way back in mid-February 2020, even before South Carolina’s first recorded cases a few weeks later. She had already spent weeks tracking the new threat since she first read about a cluster of respiratory sicknesses in China on Jan. 2.
Now, DHEC’s public health director can only look back at her former self with pity.
“That poor sucker,” Traxler said recently.
Sam Gale enters COVID-19 test results into a computer in DHEC's public health lab in Columbia. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Traxler would have never guessed she would get just three or four hours of sleep a night over the next 18 months. Or that she would regularly interrupt conversations with her husband to answer work calls.
Or that she would spend her daily commute from Greenville and Columbia deep in thought, wondering what she could say to persuade more South Carolinians to take the virus seriously and get vaccinated.
In truth, no other DHEC employee could have predicted the personal toll they would pay to combat the virus.
While many South Carolinians began working from home last spring, binge watching Tiger King and embarking on home improvement projects, DHEC’s public health workers kept coming into the office.
They ducked out of birthday parties, skipped holiday gatherings and funerals, and missed their children’s bedtimes as they tackled one crisis after another.
Bevins spent her Thanksgiving weekend on the phone with nursing home administrators, making sure they were ready for the new vaccines.
Scientists in the public health lab set up an Easter egg hunt in the office when they spent much of that holiday away from their families. They jokingly erected a “COVID cry board” with a tracker that resets to zero every time someone in the lab breaks down in tears.
DHEC employees have taken great care to celebrate career milestones, pregnancy announcements — anything that might bolster office morale even briefly. One day last week, staffers at headquarters could be seen wearing party hats in the halls and toting slices of cake for a coworker’s birthday.
“I don’t think we coped,” said Greenwood, the virology lab supervisor. “We just came in to work together.”
Remdesivir is kept inside a freezer within DHEC's Columbia warehouse for COVID-19 supplies. Remdesivir was an experimental treatment for patients suffering with the virus. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
Some saw their marriages tested and their family bonds strained. In interviews, several described 2020 as a lost year.
“I’ve just neglected the heck out of my family,” said Cofield, the operations manager.
Britt withdrew from DHEC’s COVID-19 response team a year after his panic attack. His wife was struggling to juggle her own full-time job and responsibilities at home, and the oldest of his three children was about to graduate high school.
“I wasn’t seeing them like I wanted to,” Britt said. “I felt like I had done as much as I could do.”
DHEC ramped up hiring throughout the pandemic, adding some 2,000 temporary employees to ease the load for its full-time workers. But some positions can’t be filled, and some crises can’t be managed by new hires. Veteran employees have felt guilty about taking days off and leaving their colleagues shorthanded.
“Even when I’m off, I’m not really off,” said Leslie Savage, an internal planner. “My phone is always with me.”
Savage, a key member of DHEC’s COVID-19 command staff, had planned to get married in Mexico last May.
But by late June, it had become clear the virus — and Savage’s seven-day work weeks — weren’t going away any time soon. So one Tuesday afternoon, her fiancé swung by the office, and a DHEC attorney performed their wedding ceremony in the parking lot.
The ceremony lasted just a few minutes, as cars rolled past and onlookers cast a confused eye on their way into the building.
There was no point changing out of the blue dress Savage wore to work that day. She didn’t even remove her DHEC badge. Her husband wore a T-shirt spotted with black smudges from his job as a mechanic.
They finished signing the marriage certificate in time for Savage to make her next meeting.
“I just came back and we went to work for the rest of the day,” she said.
‘Getting dragged’
On a wall at the end of the DHEC immunizations team’s rectangular war room, a television screen displays every new mention of the keyword “scdhec” on Twitter.
Communications staffers who have spent months trying to persuade S.C. residents to get the COVID-19 vaccine and take other steps to suppress the coronavirus can see in real time how their messaging is received.
Much of it isn’t pretty.
A screen monitoring Twitter comments about DHEC is situated in the back of a workspace in DHEC's Columbia headquarters. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
On Sept. 8, when DHEC tweeted a tribute to the nearly 11,000 South Carolinians who had succumbed to the virus, one user replied: “This falls very flat coming from a government who refuses to do the hard part to curb this pandemic. Get bent.”
“Fake news,” another replied the next day. “The hospitals are empty. All they have are more lies on the news. When you step outside there is no pandemic, no delta variant and there’s tons of people dying from the vaccines.”
Even DHEC employees who don’t actively track the agency’s criticism have found it impossible to ignore.
Nearly everyone, from politicians and local officials to friends on Facebook, has found reason to hammer the agency at some point in the past 18 months.
DHEC workers who participated in last spring’s conference calls about the state’s first COVID-19 cases won’t soon forget how county emergency management officials screamed at them over their agency’s lack of answers to their questions. One DHEC manager was banned from participating on the calls after he fired back.
Employees insist DHEC didn’t have all the answers back then. They were relying on evolving guidance from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about a virus no one had ever seen. Agency leaders were in uncharted legal waters, trying to determine what information they could release about new cases and what powers they had to act against the virus.
“We were getting dragged,” Cofield said. “It was a bloodbath. I was skinned alive on those calls.”
A whiteboard in DHEC's Columbia headquarters tracks the days since the COVID-19 pandemic began in South Carolina. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
In the months since, contempt for politicians has simmered within DHEC’s workforce as outspoken lawmakers have accused the agency of buckling to political pressure and doing too little — or nothing at all — to stop the coronavirus’ deadly march.
They slammed the agency for not speaking out forcefully when Republican Gov. Henry McMaster shrugged aside DHEC’s guidance in lifting coronavirus restrictions last year.
They questioned whether DHEC provided enough testing or contact tracing to contain new outbreaks. They skewered DHEC over the slow, at times chaotic rollout of the vaccine this spring.
Just in the past week, some lawmakers have called on the agency to issue a statewide mask mandate for K-12 schools. DHEC declined, reasoning it doesn’t have that authority under state law.
DHEC’s employees have made a habit of gathering in front of office flat-screens, cringing as state legislators batter their agency in televised floor speeches and Statehouse committee hearings.
“That is demoralizing to say the least,” said Danielle Maynard, DHEC’s top lawyer on COVID-19 issues.
But in a state where less than half of eligible residents are fully vaccinated, plenty of flak comes in from everyday people who think DHEC is overhyping the virus and trying to force the vaccine on people.
“Numbers don’t lie except for when liars make the numbers,” one emailer wrote.
Employees have fielded calls from school leaders confused about the state’s COVID-19 guidance, relatives of nursing home patients who were furious about visitation restrictions, even S.C. residents who wanted their COVID-19 test results prioritized.
“They’re frustrated,” said Brandi Hagman, DHEC’s liaison to K-12 public schools on coronavirus issues. “That’s a reflection of our entire community.”
DHEC leaders, including new executive director Edward Simmer, have acknowledged mistakes while noting they have had to adapt on the fly to a generational pandemic no one saw coming.
“The plan kind of went out the window on day one,” Harbison, the operations chief, told The Post and Courier.
DHEC Director of Planning David Harbison has helped lead the agency's response to the COVID-19 pandemic since South Carolina recorded its first cases of the virus in March 2020. Gavin McIntyre/Staff
In a recent interview, Simmer said he has empowered DHEC employees to speak out publicly when evidence suggests politicians are leading the state in the wrong direction.
The agency’s COVID-19 messaging has become significantly more forceful in recent months, including over the past week as DHEC has urged legislators to rethink their school mask ban.
“We need to speak the truth,” Simmer said.
'Can I do this again?'
Still, some employees admit they take off their DHEC badges before entering restaurants or grocery stores, anywhere someone might see it as a reason to start a confrontation over masks or vaccines.
They have found themselves in uncomfortable conversations with friends and relatives who subscribe to social media conspiracies that the vaccines cause infertility or isn’t effective. Even when they are off work, they have become evangelists for the life-saving shots in a state where the vaccination rate has remained frustratingly flat.
550 days of COVID-19: How DHEC continues to fight the pandemic
South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental has been working for more than 500 days to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in South Carolina.
“Suddenly, you’re on a different team,” said Florence Lopez, a 26-year DHEC veteran and registered nurse who works closely with nursing homes. “You just don’t look at each other the same way. It’s very hard to deal with.”
Simmer said employee morale was an obvious concern when he took over DHEC as executive director in February.
The agency has since worked to increase employee salaries, in addition to paying out millions of dollars in overtime over the past 18 months.
It has offered more time off by adopting strategies such as ending its longstanding practice of publishing daily COVID-19 case numbers on the weekend. That effort typically required more than a dozen people to pull, clean and analyze mounds of data.
And employees have encouraged each other to celebrate their victories against the virus. Like watching the first vaccines go into the arms of first responders. Or seeing the lives the shots saved at hard-hit nursing homes.
“You can watch something really work,” said Lopez.
Still, beleaguered employees have watched with dread as a quiet summer of COVID-19 cases has given way to a third surge of the virus.
“That’s what frustrates us,” said Blair, the logistics whiz. “We saw the light and thought this was over, and then wham, the two-by-four hits us again.”
And with the state’s abandonment of mask mandates and restrictions on large gatherings, and such widespread hesitancy to take the vaccines, they can feel their days growing longer with no end in sight.
“Knowing what I’ve sacrificed,” attorney Maynard said, “it is difficult to stomach the little things that people are unwilling to do.”
Some feel they are running on fumes as demand for their time and energy picks back up again.
Some days, Cofield, the operations manager, sits in her car in the DHEC parking lot before or after a grueling shift and repeatedly asks herself the same question:
“Can I do this again?”