At the beginning of the COVID-19 health emergency in March 2020, the Jackson Township Division of Fire in Grove City had a problem.
Its vendors that normally provide the EMTs and Firefighters with gloves, gowns and other medical supplies told them they were running low.
Fire Chief Randy Little said he did what every other American did, he started to shop for those supplies online.
Using Amazon and eBay, Little said his team was able to buy enough gloves, eye goggles and half-respirator cartridges to keep his crews safe. Now he said he has enough PPE to last three years.
He said responding to calls for patients with COVID-19 is a lot like responding to a burning home.
“It's not unlike a house that catches on fire. We don't know if there are victims we don't know if the floors are sound, we don't know if it's going to collapse we want to be as cautious as possible,” he said.
Caution remains a top priority for his firefighters. Chief Little said the division invested in electrostatic sprayers to clean its medical units.
Every Friday, or when a COVID-19 patient is transported inside one of their medical units, the station's hazmat crew dressed in protective gowns, sprays the inside of the medical units.
From the floors to drawers and anything else that was touched, all of it is sprayed. Firefighters say the mixture of chemicals inside the sprayer can kill the virus.
Chief Little said a lot has changed since the pandemic started.
“In the beginning, about 14% of our calls were COVID related, and now we're down to about 3%,” he said.
He said his crews were not immune to getting sick.
“About 15 of our firefighters tested positive, but they’ve all recovered,” he said.
His fire department is located in the 43123 zip code. According to the Ohio Department of Health COVID-19 website, this zip code has the highest number of total COVID cases in all of Franklin County - more than 6,000 cases since the pandemic started.
That ranks it the third highest in the entire state. We wanted to know why and it turns out, there isn't one reason.
“I would think we are testing more people in the 43123 than many other communities, but I can't say for sure,” said Chief Little.
Inside hospitals like OhioHealth Riverside Methodist Hospital in Columbus where vaccinations came first, the revolving door of COVID-19 patients has taken its toll on those inside the ICU Unit.
“It's definitely been a challenge mentally, physically, emotionally; just exhausting,” Dara Pence, ICU Administrative Nurse Manager Riverside Methodist Hospital, said.
“You see your team struggle. You see each other struggle and try to be that support person, but you can't be because you're also going through it,” she said.
Stopping the virus from spreading inside hospitals meant stopping the public from coming inside to visit loved ones.
That left nurses to be there when the most serious COVID patients took their last breaths.
“The hardest part for our teams is the emotional side of it,” Pence said.
As a frontline worker, Pence describes working with COVID-19 as “living in the gray,” a term she used to describe the unknowns associated with this invisible enemy.
“How do we care for these patients? What are the long-term effects of COVID-19? What are the short-term effects?” she said.
Inside Underwood Funeral Home in Marysville, Scott Underwood saw first-hand how the virus took the lives of people in his community.
“Half of the families we served in January were COVID positive,” he said.
January was also the month Underwood said he saw more bodies in his morgue than ever before.
“It's been very hard especially when I hear stories of survivors not being able to go inside a nursing home or hospital they've been kept away and their loved one has died without them being there,” he said.
Funeral directors and embalmers across Ohio had been in the back of the line to get a COVID-19 vaccine up until Gov. Mike DeWine's announcement on Monday. Those professions, along with law enforcement officers and child care workers, are among individuals eligible for a vaccine starting Thursday.
Nearly one year into the pandemic, these first responders at the front lines, continue to do their jobs despite the dangers.
It's clear to them, it's going to take all of us to win the war against COVID-19.
“We have to come together as a community; we have to fight together as a community against this unknown this unseen virus,” said Pence.