Reflections on working through the pandemic, 5 years after COVID emerged

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• Amna Nawaz:

  It's been over five years since COVID-19 began spreading across the U.S. The virus killed more than a million Americans and reshaped our entire society.

  Tonight, we begin a new series with reflections from people in their own words who lived and worked through the pandemic.

• Colleen Bridger, Former Assistant City Manager, San Antonio, Texas:

  I am Dr. Colleen Bridger. I'm the former assistant city manager for the city of San Antonio who oversaw public health during the pandemic.

  None of us expected the pandemic to last as long as it did. And so we didn't treat it like a marathon. We treated it like a sprint. And then we just kept doing sprint after sprint after sprint after sprint and never resting. There was no way to balance work and life during the pandemic if you were a public health responder.

  You were just a public health responder. And so I have two adult children. My first grandchild was born during the pandemic, a husband of now 35 years. All of them got zero attention from me. My marriage struggled as a result. My relationship with my kids struggled as a result. And I ended up retiring because, in a way, I said I was going to be a consultant because that was a good cover.

  I wasn't — I wasn't retiring. I was moving on to something else, but really I just needed a break. I just needed to not do this anymore. But it took me longer to get over the pandemic than I thought it would. And the thought of doing it all over again still puts a pit in my stomach.

  Looking back five years later, I feel like public health did an amazing job, given everything that we were dealing with, both at the local, state, and national level. It was extremely challenging, though, to be the person who was one of many public faces when it came to talking about the pandemic, talking about COVID-19.

  And it was probably three years before I stopped waking up at 3:00 in the morning in this kind of cold sweat, wondering what I had forgotten or done wrong or not thought of. I got death threats. I got tons of voice-mail messages and a lot of just kind of hateful hidden messages.

  When people are scared, their brain works differently. Your need to survive becomes front and center. At least in retrospect now, I understand that. I will say, though, that now what I'm seeing is, it's becoming a default for some people. And that scares me for the next pandemic, because, as this is escalating, I don't know. If I got a death threat today about something, I might not be able to just say, oh, that's just somebody being scared and it's not really going to happen.

  There is a disbanding of the trust in public health that really kind of got its critical mass during the pandemic, and I see it getting increasingly worse. And I think we're seeing that play out around the measles outbreak that we have right now.

  If there is another pandemic, local public health officers are going to have to band together to figure out what they know and how they're going to share information from a place of respecting people's autonomy and freedom. But I think we need to start figuring out who the respected messengers are to communicate that scientifically accurate information that people need in order to do what they feel is best for their families to protect themselves.