On March 6th, 2020, my novel Fugitive Spy was released. The inspiration for the novel was a nonfiction title called Biohazard by Ken Alibek which I read around 2016. That book was published in 2000.

The author of Biohazard was intimately involved in the bioweapons program for the Russian Federation (formerly the Soviet Union) in the late 1980’s. His job was to increase the virulence of bioweapons through lab manipulation. He concluded at the end of his book that despite international law– he felt confident these expiraments were ongoing in different parts of the world.

Gain of function research. Sound familiar?

Pandemics are part of our human history and will continue to be. When I first entered nursing in 1993, HIV had been on the scene for about a decade. This virus has killed approximately 40+ million people. COVID-19 and its subvariants, depending on the source you consider and the reliability of the data, is currently around 7 million.

When the pandemic broke in March of 2020, I was working as a Nursing House Supervisor at a mid size children’s hospital. When did I know COVID would be different than other pandemics? After all, I had trained to deal with the Ebola outbreak that occurred from 2014-2016 and there were only a handful of US cases. Lots of prep– no excitement. This is generally what we like in healthcare.

To be honest, my first inkling that something was going to be different was when my daughters’ marching band trip to Disneyland was cancelled days before they were set to fly out. In quick fashion, things began to shut down. Grocery stores were emptying out. I was hoping this was going to be short lived. A few months and we’d be in the clear as I’d experienced with worse than normal flu or RSV seasons. A physician friend of mine said buckle up– this is going to last 2-3 years. She was right.

When the adult hospital on our campus erected a tent in their parking lot for overflow cases–mmmm– I had not seen anything like that before. We changed how we used PPE. We changed what rooms certain patients could go in based on room flow and filtration. We stopped offering some services. OR and PACU nurses were running screening desks. Visiting guidelines changed weekly– if not daily.

I honestly can’t imagine what my adult nursing colleagues were going through. Our cases in the early days did not come close to what they were dealing with. The bravery of every healthcare provider from first responders to specialists astounds me to this day. It’s easy now to look back and think– what were they so worried about?

We were operating in darkness. Physicians were using past experience to treat a novel virus. The toolbelt of medications was sparse. Think about that . . . . standing at a bedside with a patient in front of you sick with something you don’t know how to treat . . . you don’t know how it’s really being spread . . . but you see people dying and are wondering if you are next to get ill or die simply because you showed up and were steadfastly honoring the commitment you made to take care of sick people . . . of perfect strangers.

The WHO estimates a median average of 115,000 healthcare workers lost their lives. The range is 80,000 to 180,000 worldwide. Healthcare workers that have died from HIV as the result of an on the job exposure is far, far less.

In those early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, I would come home from work, throw my scrubs directly in the wash, and shower before I was close to anyone in my family.

That’s what the early days were like . . .