‘We realized this is legit’: Elgin paramedic remembers early days of COVID
Five years after the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in the suburbs, Elgin Fire Department Division Chief Chris Kennedy remembers how easy it was to dismiss the threat of a pandemic in the early days.
Kennedy, who will mark 19 years with the department in June, was a lieutenant and firefighter/paramedic at the time.
“Frankly, this wasn’t the first time that we had been warned of the next pandemic coming,” he said.
Kennedy started in emergency medicine in the early 2000s when there were rising fears about a possible SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic — the first pandemic of the 21st century. Then came the influenza A virus pandemic (pH1N1) in 2009 and then the global Ebola outbreak around 2013 that caused concern but never became widespread in the United States.
“So to be honest, when we started hearing about this COVID, I don’t think we really took it that seriously because it wasn’t the first time that we had heard about some new bug that was going to wreck everybody’s life,” he said. “That obviously changed pretty darn quickly. We realized this is legit, and it’s going to be here for a while.”
Kennedy said it soon became apparent how their new reality in the fire department would change.
“We had a set of 12 N95 masks. And every week for years, we inventoried those things, and we never opened them,” he said. “In the 14 years I had worked in the department, I had never put on an N95 mask.”
That changed when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made wearing them on certain calls among its first recommendations.
“Firemen, in general, are not really great about following new rules,” he said. “Guys were kind of resistant to putting them on — like this isn’t really that big of a deal.”
He remembers telling his colleagues they all needed to put N95s on during one of their first calls with a patient in respiratory distress.
“It was just such a weird order to give,” he said.
The next day he got a call from the assistant chief saying the patient had tested positive for COVID. All five firefighters ended up being quarantined because the rapidly evolving CDC guidelines had just changed, saying they should also have been wearing gowns.
“So I spent the next 10 days in my basement,” he said.
None of the five tested positive after the incident that day. But throughout the pandemic, he and many of his coworkers came down with COVID.
He said no Elgin firefighters suffered any serious, irreversible effects, though a couple did battle “long COVID.” Other departments weren’t as fortunate. Kennedy said he knew a battalion chief from a different suburban department who nearly died after dealing with collapsed lungs and being on a ventilator.
“They weren’t sure he was ever going to be able to make it back on the job because he had so much damage in scar tissue in his lungs,” he said. “So for us (in Elgin), we were very lucky.”
Kennedy credited the command staff for mitigating the dangers firefighters were facing.
“I always felt very safe because I knew we were taking precautions,” he said. “The department did an excellent job of putting the resources where they needed to be to make sure our guys were safe and had what they needed to respond effectively and help people in need.”
When getting masks became difficult, they started recycling their N95s, sending them to a company in Waukegan that would chemically wash them and send them back.
They also created a unique position for a few months to make sure everyone was following the protocols.
Kennedy was among a few firefighters to serve as “COVID officers.” Every shift, the officer would go on any COVID-related call, carrying all the personal protective equipment (PPE) and making sure everyone was following proper safety procedures.
“It was such a new phenomenon that our guys weren’t used to having to put gowns on and wearing N95s,” he said. “After a couple of months, it got to the point where it became second nature to the guys and they didn’t need a ‘mom’ to remind them to be safe.”