Many people who work in the health department have been out due to the virus everyone globally is facing, Covid-19 has spread out everywhere and as much as we hate to say it is not getting any better. There are new strains of Covid-19 such as Delta, and Omicron which are both more dangerous and a lot easier to spread. Cases out here in Humboldt county keep going up, around 80- 200 new covid cases are confirmed. It has caused a lot of deaths for all ages. Covid cases went up a lot during summer 2021, all clinics and hospitals were very low on Covid- 19 vaccines, they didn't have enough at times to give them out to all those who wanted to be provided with it. Due to that many people ended up catching Covid.

I wanted to get a little more information on this topic about how Covid-19 has affected our local clinics and hospitals. I decided to interview Ashley Chiu (my mom) who was the manager of the Open Door Clinic here in Eureka which is our community's second biggest health center here in Humboldt county, at the time when covid first occurred here in Humboldt County. Now my mom is now the director of the Clinic here in Eureka, she has seen covid from the beginning to how it is right now. She has been the one to update not only me but also my family about how covid is, by informing us to be more cautious due to how bad it has gotten in two years. When I interviewed I first began to ask her “How has covid affected you and local clinics and hospitals here in Humboldt'', she then went on and claimed that “Covid-19 has been affected me in numerous ways because it caused me to be more cautious with everything, I have to stay home often and work from home because there are so many people calling out… I can't go to work and risk myself getting exposed to bringing it to you guys.” She also stated that “I have coworkers constantly calling in sick because they caught the virus or their kids have it… we have been short on staff which pushes a lot back and i have to change the schedules up everyday for everyone's tasks… it's tiring but that's also my job”. Since my mom is the director of Open Door Clinic she has to plan out the day for the whole clinic where she has to assign everyone their patients for the day, who they're going to be shadowed by, she also has up to around eight interviews at the most a day, and three meetings, she never gets a lunch break so I can tell how stressed out she can be because of her job position. We then got into the topic of getting your covid vaccine, she stated that during the middle of 2021, our county was very low on supply, such as covid tests and covid-19 vaccines, it was hard to schedule appointments to get your first dose of the vaccine and their wasn't as many places there is now to go get tested for free. It has also been proven for you to be less likely to catch covid, it also beats off covid faster if you are vaccinated. Now in any health department you are required to be fully vaccinated, this rule was mandated during the end of 2021. I asked my mom if the vaccine mandate affected the clinic, she then went on and said “ Believe it or not it affected us a lot, we lost a lot of our staff members because we had to tell them they can no longer work for us because they were notified months, and weeks previous there was going to be a mandate… Well some ended up quitting and we had to fire staff members because they didn't believe in the vaccine.” My mom then went on and explained how they lost a handful of staff and that's what caused her to have so many interviews a day. She had to find new front desk workers, and more staff to give out vaccines in the back parking lot. Luckily the Open Door Clinic has managed to find enough staff to replace those who ended up leaving. Till this day they are still slightly short on staff, and that our county is very low on covid tests because of how highly our cases have escalated especially after Winter Break 2021, during that duration of two weeks hundreds of people caught covid, and many of her coworkers are quarantining right now because they caught the virus. Luckily the clinic has not had an covid-19 outbreak usually one or two people in their individual pods are out. I hope this helps you understand how covid-19 has affected many health centers out here in our community.