Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/1264973
13 t m c p u l s e | j u ly 2 02 0 The weekend passed with no improvement in her symptoms. By then, Clapp was exceedingly dehydrated. Her internist called on Monday morning and sent her to the Houston Methodist Emergency Care Center at Kirby Dr. and U.S. 59. She was tested for COVID-19. "They were going to put me in the hospital, which I was not pleased about, but I stayed five hours and they determined I could go home," she said. She left the ER with an IV and a few bags of saline. On her way home, she went to a CVS drive-through to fill a prescription for anti-nausea medication and bought a store-brand bottle of acetaminophen because the Tylenol was sold out. A COVID-19 diagnosis The next morning, someone from Houston Methodist called to tell Clapp she had tested posi- tive for COVID-19. She notified her hematologist and was advised to cut her doses of oral chemotherapy in half. The medication reduces the white blood cells her immune system needed to fully fight the coro- navirus. She also contacted her relatives and her hairdresser about the diagnosis. Her internist declined to prescribe hydroxy- chloroquine, a medication that initially received emergency use authorization as a COVID-19 treatment from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, though that authorization was revoked in mid-June. "She said: 'No, I'm not going to give that to you. We're just going to wear it out,'" Clapp recalled. As a high-risk, older patient, Clapp needed to be monitored. She received a call or text almost daily from Houston Health Department (HHD) epidemiologist Tahani Hamdan. "I had this illness that's sweeping the nation and killing everybody, particularly the elderly," Clapp said. "The only thing that scared me is that all of these people were dying. That's all you heard on the TV. What do you do when you're lying in bed listening to the TV?" She found comfort in conversations with Hamdan and during at-home testing visits with HHD senior public health investigator Teresa Garcia. "They were loving, gracious, compassionate and concerned," Clapp said. "I have been so cared for … by these two city servants who went so far above and beyond." The human factor The Houston Health Department receives COVID-19 infection reports from hospitals and labs. That data is tracked by the agency's informatics team. Hamdan and other city health department epidemiologists are responsible for the follow-up investigations that wrap flesh and emotion around the numbers. Every "person under investigation" or PUI who has been diagnosed is contacted directly or via caregivers or through the hospital. The epidemiologists are tasked with tracking those individuals until they recover, as well as others who have been exposed. All of these duties during a pandemic have made the roles of public health professionals, namely contact tracers, more prominent. "We have phone duty, so we talk with the doc- tors, we talk with the nurses and medical staff. We do a lot of investigations over the phone with the patients," said Hamdan, who previously fol- lowed up on Zika infections in pregnant women and children. In many ways, Hamdan's job now is to calm uncertainty and clarify confusion for patients. "These are people that matter. They are wor- ried about their lives and their families," the epi- demiologist said. "COVID-19 has taken a toll on a lot of people mentally, emotionally and physically. A lot of people are scared." ➟