Confessions of a California Covid Nurse

The Humboldt County Public Health department in California is inside what used to be a juvenile jail. The offices are former prison cells. A few of the doors still have the small windows with the sliding panels that allowed guards to observe prisoners. The basement is a dungeon, the lab equipment is jammed into a small room never meant to be a lab, and the staff are on top of each other in ways that would have seemed unhealthy even before the pandemic. I asked the county’s head of infectious disease if she could help me identify the building’s architectural style. She had to think about it. “Old,” she finally said.

When Erica Dykehouse, one of the county’s two infectious-disease nurses, arrives at this building each morning, the first thing she does is search her databases for new positive Covid-19 tests. Up until the county confirmed its first coronavirus case, on Feb. 20, she’d spent her days tracking the odd case of measles or syphilis or one of the 80 other diseases people gave to each other. She worked an ordinary 40-hour week with the sense that basically no one outside her office had any idea what public health nurses did, or that they even existed. But she loved her job, thought of it as her calling. She’d traded a better-paying job as a primary care nurse, in which she found herself solving the same health problems over and over, for one where she felt she could help prevent those health problems from occurring in the first place. “The downside is you can’t quantify what you prevented,” she said.