‘Nobody Sees Us’: Testing-Lab Workers Strain Under Demand

‘A dying breed’

For some, the tidal wave of stress brought on by the pandemic has proved untenable. Since March, scientists have trickled out of laboratories, leaving chasms of expertise in a field that for years has struggled to recruit fresh talent.

Joanne Bartkus, the former director of the Minnesota Department of Public Health Laboratory, retired from her position in May after a dozen years on the job. She pinned one of the pandemic’s crucial inflection points to March 6, the day President Trump publicly remarked that “anybody that wants a test can get a test.”

“That was when the poop hit the fan,” Dr. Bartkus said. Within about a week, her team went from receiving fewer than a dozen coronavirus testing samples each day to being inundated with roughly 1,000 daily specimens.

It was unlike anything Dr. Bartkus had seen in her years at the institution. In 2009, the year of the H1N1 flu pandemic, Minnesota’s public health laboratory tested about 6,000 patient samples. This spring, it broke that record in a couple of weeks.

Dr. Bartkus, who is 65, had already planned to retire before the year was up. By the time April came, she had hastened her timeline to May: “It didn’t take me long before I said, ‘OK, I’m done with this.’”

In interviews, several scientists noted that they were struggling to fill vacancies in their labs, some that were left open by overwhelmed technologists who had recently quit their jobs. While the need for such workers has grown in recent years, the number of training programs that build these skill sets has dropped.

“Medical technologists are a dying breed,” Ms. Stoeppler, of the University of North Carolina, said.