Houghton County and the surrounding area have some unique organizations, and over the past year, many of them came together to help control, monitor and rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic.

As COVID-19 loomed large at the beginning of 2020, Kevin Store, executive director at the Portage Health Foundation, said discussions started happening early about what role they would play in the community.

“In the absence of our own capacity to step out in front of it to serve our community, how do we make sure that we’re best supporting those entities that are going to have to step out?” Store said.

PHF hosted virtual discussions among important people and organizations in the community that needed to coordinate pandemic responses. Healthcare organizations, the local health department, school leaders, legislators, community organizations and others were included in efforts to identify and address both short-term and long-term issues in the community.

As schools were closed down early in the pandemic, one of the local programs that needed help was 31 Backpacks, an all-volunteer organization that helps to feed school kids who are food-insecure by supplying them with food for weekends and breaks.

As the pandemic shutdowns were announced, 31 Backpacks was about to prepare their “Big Pack”, which has extra food for kids over spring break. They emptied the pantry shelves filling bags. Then, over just a couple of weeks, the number of kids looking for help went from around 225 to over 2,100.

“We were in crisis mode for probably a month and a half,” Melissa Maki said. “It’s something that nobody was prepared for.”

Maki is vice-president and co-founder of 31 Backpacks. They reached out to schools and the food bank, which they qualify as a nonprofit to purchase from, and worked out a system for school district representatives to go to the food bank and get what they need. 31 Backpacks paid the cost, and school districts rotated when they went to avoid depleting the food bank supplies.

In the midst of this, Portage Health Foundation reached out to support the extra effort.

“We were the first ones that they contacted, and they gave us $5,000,” Maki said.

In November and December of 2020, as part of their “Giving Tuesday” campaign, PHF helped raise more than $47,000 with matching funds. 31 Backpacks also received direct support through Facebook, volunteers, and donations from many other local organizations throughout the year.

As hand sanitizer (and toilet paper) disappeared from store shelves, it became difficult for some nonprofits to safely maintain contact with their clients. Copper Country Senior Meals struggled to safely meet the needs of their clients, but received support from organizations like PHF, the Upper Peninsula Commission for Area Progress (UPCAP), and the Meals on Wheels program.

“We were able to have sanitizing solution for the kitchens and our meal delivery personnel because of the foundation,” CCSM Director Jennifer Szubielak said in an email.

Some of the sanitizing solution that PHF helped distribute came from Iron Fish Distillery, makers  of Copper Queen Whiskey. With permission from state licensing, Iron Fish created several batches of hand sanitizer for nonprofits and healthcare organizations at a time when it wasn’t available on most store shelves.

Caryn Heldt, who holds a doctorate in chemical engineering and leads Michigan Tech’s Health Research Institute, put much of her life on hold as she worked to organize and run the COVID-19 testing lab at MTU.

“I basically gave up my job for about nine months,” Heldt said. “It was a complete shift.”

Normally, Heldt teaches classes, writes grants, and works with graduate students but that all went on hold as she worked to establish MTU’s first certified testing lab.

“Most of the labs you hear about that started up out of universities already had a certified lab,” Heldt said.

MTU didn’t already have one and had to find a medical director with the proper credentials to sponsor the lab. This was especially challenging because not only would a director have to be willing to take on the extra responsibility, but such medical directors can only sponsor a limited number of labs. At first, Heldt said they couldn’t find anyone with availability.

Dr. Cary Gottlieb, a pathologist from OSF St. Francis Hospital in Escanaba, stepped into the role.

“It's his name and his license that we're basically running under,” Heldt said. “And we never met him.”

The organization of the lab happened mostly over conference calls, starting in March. Heldt and Gottlieb didn’t meet in person until the following summer, and Gottlieb didn’t visit the lab for the first time until September.

“Without him, we never could have done this,” Heldt said. “It would have been completely impossible and the time that he has given to us has just been phenomenal.”

The lab was up and running in April, with graduate students and volunteers running samples manually in biosafety cabinets. Four to five cabinets would be run at a time, each by a single person.

“One person could do 12 samples at a time, and it would take about two hours,” Heldt said.

They were able to expand that process to 24 samples at a time, but add to the process the time it took to record and track the samples, and they were only able to process about 200 samples a day.

Reporting the results was also a challenge. The daily test results also had to be faxed, both to test providers and the health department because it was the only HIPAA-compliant way to transfer the results.

“So that was over 400 faxes we were running a day,” Heldt said. “And yeah, we actually burned out a couple machines.”

That system took 12 people, working in at least three, four-hour shifts, to process 80 samples.

“If we received the samples at 7:30 a.m. in the morning, we would typically get the results between 8 and 10 p.m.,” Heldt said.

PHF helped speed this in a couple of ways. One was a machine to automate some of the testing processes. This more than doubled the number of samples they could run, and with half as many people. It also produced results in six to eight hours rather than twelve or more. PHF also provided the testing lab with a laboratory information system to handle the results and eliminate the need to send faxes. Instead of hours spent reporting test results, after reviewing the results they could be sent securely as simply as an email.

The success of the local testing lab granted the area a faster turn-around time for test results. Even as testing capacity across the country caught up with the demand, not having to ship samples out of the area shaved at least a day off of test result times. Heldt thinks this helped the community effort by reinforcing individual decisions.

“Just to give people confidence of whether or not they had a positive or negative test,” she said. “It’s hard to quarantine when you don’t really think you need to.”

Store said the focus on testing gives the community better information to base other big decisions on, too.

PHF has now dedicated more than $1 million to be spent on local COVID-19 prevention, mitigation and relief, with much of it already distributed.

Maki said that the need at schools has leveled off, at about six times what they were before the pandemic. Donations had initially spiked to meet that need.

 “But now we’re kind of leveling off again,” Maki said.

She’s hopeful that fundraising events will make up the difference as they’re allowed to happen this year.

Heldt said now she’s trying to get back to the job she was hired by the university for, and that everyone is looking forward to the day they can decommission the testing lab.

“We’re not quite there yet, but hopefully it will be in the very near future,” she said.

Editor’s note: If you’ve been helped by a community organization during the pandemic, please leave your story in the comments below!