Postcards From The Pandemic: Lab Technician At Frontline Of COVID Testing

In the early days of the pandemic, testing for the coronavirus was critical for measuring its spread through the community. But testing kits were limited and only a few labs could perform the work.

The Cleveland Clinic was one of the first hospitals in the country to do in-house testing. Tricia Johnson, a medical laboratory scientist in the clinic’s Department of Molecular Microbiology, said when she and her colleagues first heard about COVID-19, they began by treating it like other pandemics.

“We lived through the H1N1 2009 pandemic, we have seen the Ebola crisis and how we dealt with it. So we were kind of approaching it the same way we do for all pandemics,” Johnson said. “We kind of use caution and then figure out, ‘Ok, so how are we going to test this?’”

To develop a test, they had to learn more about the novel coronavirus, Johnson said. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention developed a test to detect for the coronavirus, and the Cleveland Clinic adapted that test, so Johnson and other lab technicians could replicate it, she said.

Being able to test in-house helped speed up the process because they no longer had to send the sample to the CDC.

“That’s why it was so great to have the opportunity here to do the testing,” she said.

At the same time, normal lab work at the clinic continued, putting extra stress on Johnson’s team. 

“When COVID-19 hit, our team was kind of split into two halves,” she said. “Half of us are focused to do COVID-19 testing. We were trained to do it and just do the analysis and all of that stuff.”

The other half kept up with their original workload, which included testing for HPV, sexually transmitted diseases, and viruses.

Johnson said it’s been overwhelming, but teamwork has helped them get through the past year.

“We’ve been working through lunches, we’re just exhausted, we’ve been doing more than enough work than we’ve ever done before,” she said. “It’s been crazy, but just an amazing way that our team is just showing we can work through anything basically.”