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Volunteering in North Carolina in 2018 in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence was predictable compared to the work Melissa Early is doing with the Virginia Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) as a COVID-19 vaccinator in the Richmond area.
“Nobody knows when it's going to end,” says Early, who is a member of the Virginia Nurses Association. “Nobody knows when another strain is coming. You're doing things that you've never done before.”
The Henrico County nurse has served for more than three years as a reserve corps volunteer. When she received an alert requesting volunteers to help with testing efforts, she complied. Since then, she has worked at numerous testing and vaccination clinics. There are no words to describe the feeling of helping the community in this effort, she says. Although Early feels like she is fulfilling her life’s purpose, dealing with personal grief as well as the uncertainty and limited information about COVID-19 has been difficult, she says.
“The fear that everybody has about not knowing and doing best practices based on just the little information that we have, that’s been the most difficult thing for me, that and the friends I have lost,” Early says.
Despite the challenges, Early expects to continue volunteering. She hopes that by this summer, the vaccine will be distributed to everyone who is able to get it and Richmond can start to acclimate to a “new normal.”
“I don't think there's any going back to the way things were,” Early says, “but a lot of positive things have come out of this. A lot of new ways to use technology in the health care field, and then there's some things that have been not so OK, the decline of folks’ mental health and things like that.”
Early is one of more than 1,400 reserve corps volunteers distributing the vaccine statewide, according to Jennifer Freeland, state volunteer coordinator for the Virginia Department of Health’s Office of Emergency Preparedness. In Richmond and Henrico, the number of MRC volunteers approved to distribute the vaccine is over 110, according to Kate Bausman of the Medical Reserve Corps and special response coordinator at the Richmond Health District.
As of Feb. 16, 23,437 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine have been administered in Richmond, and 54,950 had been administered in Henrico County, according to the Virginia Department of Health COVID-19 website.
The number of statewide volunteers has more than doubled since last year, rising from 10,000 on January 2020 to more than 24,800 as of late January, according to Freeland. She hopes the rising number of volunteers can help meet Gov. Ralph Northam’s goal of distributing 25,000 vaccines per day.
“I’m very proud of our team, our coordination team, the teamwork at VDH,” Freeland says. “The ability to have the infrastructure, to be able to accomplish what we have accomplished is really unprecedented.”
Freeland has never seen a rise in volunteers of the magnitude seen in response to COVID-19 vaccination appeals, she says. The number of vaccination volunteers is bigger than the number of vaccines available in Virginia, she adds.
“It's a bad problem in the fact that we don't have enough vaccines,” she says, “but it's a good problem, with having lots of people that are willingly standing by, eager to help put shots in arms, and so I think that we'll see our citizens of the commonwealth continue to step forward and meet that need. It's incredibly humbling and just astounding that that many people have stepped forward.”
In Bausman’s 20 years working in volunteer engagement she, too, has never seen such an increase in numbers.
“This is a whole other level,” she says. “I mean, our unit doubled in March from 500 to 1,000, and then it's about to double again.”
When the volunteer effort in response to the pandemic began in Virginia, Bausman noticed that people from all kinds of career backgrounds had signed up to pitch in, but as the vaccine has become available the need for medical volunteers has increased. One of those volunteers with a medical background is Mechanicsville radiologist Susan Whitelock Bennett, who has volunteered with MRC for four years. Whitelock Bennett started responding to the COVID-19 pandemic by volunteering at testing sites, she says.
Whitelock Bennett says she feels like her work volunteering during the COVID-19 era is what she had always imagined being in the medical field would be like. “The COVID response has been refreshing because it makes you feel like you're actually doing something to help, whereas in the daily grind you start to wonder if you're making a difference,” she says.
Volunteer work had entailed helping people sign up for tests or vaccine appointments, she says, but as the vaccine became available and the need for volunteers who could distribute the vaccine increased, Whitelock Bennett decided to complete the vaccinator training.
Having volunteered at testing and vaccination events, Whitelock Bennett was eligible to receive the vaccine. However, that did not change the precautions she took to protect others.
“[Getting the vaccine] really doesn't mean a whole lot of change for my day-to-day life; you still want to try not to get [the virus],” Whitelock Bennett says. “So, I know that I won't at least become a burden to my family by getting really sick, or being in the ICU or, God forbid, dying. But I can still spread [COVID-19], and the more people that get [the virus], the more chances it has to mutate.”
Volunteering has helped Whitelock Bennett evolve in her career as well, she says. The contact she has had with people during her volunteer work has encouraged her to seek a path that would allow her to continue to interact with patients, which does not happen often during her work in radiology, she adds.
