This coming Sunday will mark four years since the first COVID-19 case emerged in Michigan. An illness that changed our state, our nation, and the world we live in.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 7 million people in the United States have been hospitalized and more than 1 million people have died from the virus.
In Michigan, there have been nearly 3 million confirmed cases and more than 40,000 deaths.
One of the first to see the impacts of the pandemic was the healthcare industry and education.
Dr. Joe Santangelo with Munson Healthcare said pre-pandemic feels like a lifetime ago and that healthcare will never be what it was.
“I think the hardest part about getting back to normal is figuring out what normal is and learning to live in that new world,” said Dr. Santangelo.
The industry is not as isolated as it was.
“I think we all always wanted to be more integrated, but it didn’t come naturally to the healthcare.
environment. So, there were some specific things about COVID that really pushed us in that direction,” said Dr. Santangelo.
Dr. Santangelo said Covid was new, and it was something they didn’t know how to treat at first.
“Downstate, they were having much more COVID and more patients in the hospital, more patients on ventilators. They were learning really quickly how to care for this condition by doing it hands on. And then they were teaching us when COVID started to become more of an issue up here,” said Dr. Santangelo.
He said the same thing happened with local health departments.
“We worked more closely together during the pandemic than ever before because of just the nature of the disease and the way that we were looking at it and learning about it all at once,” said Dr. Santangelo.
Lake City Area Schools superintendent, Tim Hejnal said it seems like yesterday.
He said the biggest lesson he learned is the tenacity of educators, and how quickly they were able to move online.
“To create a virtual school environment and to learn those skills, whether they were into technology or not in a matter of 2 to 3 weeks, so that we could still connect with kids in a way that was important,” said Hejnal.
Hejnal said Covid gave them the opportunity to rethink how they deliver education and deal with mental health.
“It gave us a chance to really assess everything that we do with regard to how we meet the learning needs and social emotional needs of our students and our teachers,” said Hejnal.
He said it’s ok things will never be as they were before Covid.
“There’s comfort in that going back to the way that things were. But I think if people stop and really think through it. the way things were may have not been best. And we’re being really careful here at Lake City to make sure that what we do moving forward is best even if it’s a change,” said Hejnal.