When Tufts students have birthdays these days, they don’t look forward to hosting a big party or trying a new restaurant or bar. Instead, they know that when they announce their birthday as they check in at the COVID-19 testing center at 62R Talbot Ave., they’ll be given a warm smile and a “happy birthday” from whoever is checking them in.
Just like masks, social distancing and Zoom, COVID-19 tests have become a routine part of life at Tufts amid the pandemic. While these twice-weekly tests are usually a quick stop for students on their way to class or as they pick up food from a dining center, dozens of people have dedicated their professional lives to keep this system running for the past eight months. Here are some of the people working 11-and-a-half-hour shifts and currently overseeing roughly 1,700 tests each day to keep Tufts healthy, along with others who are tasked with constantly improving the system.
First, though, it would be helpful to understand some basics of the testing center: Tufts has a contract with Brewster Ambulance Service, one of the oldest private EMS services in New England. With both EMTs and non-certified support staffers, Brewster staffs the regular testing center at 62R, along with a special testing center at 51 Winthrop Street for those who have come in close contact with individuals who have tested positive. Brewster’s managerial team worked closely with Tufts to design the testing process, and Brewster is also helping Tufts navigate the all-important next phase of the pandemic: vaccine acquisition and distribution.
In addition to Tufts and Brewster, the third major partner in the testing process is the Broad Institute,which receives shipments of swabs three times a day and completes the actual lab work to test for the COVID-19 virus.
What’s in a day?
Work at 62R begins early in the day with setting up the site at 6:30 a.m. and continues until the center closes to students and faculty at 6 p.m. However, for Nicole Machado, one of the site leads, the day begins even earlier.
“I live in Rhode Island, so I get up at 3 a.m. I leave my house at 4:15. I have to be at our base in [Weymouth, Mass. at] 5:30 to pick up the vehicle and the rest of my team, then we drive to Tufts. We're there for 11 hours, then we drive back to base and then from base, I still have to drive back to Rhode Island.” Machado said. “I don't get home till 8:15 p.m. And I go right to sleep and do it again. I've been working about 70 to 80 hours every week since July or August.”
Despite the long hours, Machado says she loves her job. She feels lucky to work alongside her daughter and cares deeply for members of her team, as well as the Tufts community. When she sits at the entrance to the testing center, checking students in, Machado is excited to speak with them and make new connections.
“I know a lot of [students] by face, and they come in and we talk like we've known each other for years. I have relationships with certain students that just know who I am [and] who my daughter is. Some brought us Christmas presents, which was totally unthinkable to me … It was great,” Machado said.
During the day, testing center staff also work in what they call “the bubble,” which is the room where students actually swab their noses. In the bubble, staff members take students’ samples.
Another aspect of working at the testing center, invisible to all but a small group of students, is checking in on the students who are in the modular residential units, or Mods, which Machado jokingly calls the “cootie cages." While the staff’s job is to make sure that students are healthy by checking their vital signs and assessing their symptoms, multiple staff members emphasized the importance of checking in on students’ mental health as well. These EMTs and support staffers are quarantined students’ only in-person contact during their isolation, and they are very aware of this.
“I always make sure to tell the students, ‘Look, I know you're quarantined, but just make sure you're somehow keeping in touch with people, whether it's FaceTime or texting or actually talking on the phone. Weather permitting, go outside, get some fresh air,’” Machado said. “I just tell them … ‘Your mental health is so important, and don't feel like you're just stuck in here by yourself. And you got to make the best of it.’”
When Machado says to make the best of it, she’s speaking from experience. In 2008, while working as an accountant at NBC TV in Rhode Island, she got into a car accident that left her needing two neck surgeries and still continues to cause her pain today. In recovery from her surgeries, Machado realized she wasn’t satisfied with her professional life. Machado eventually went back to school at 46 years old to earn her EMT certification.
“I graduated Feb. 1 of 2020. You have to take a national exam and pass it to be an EMT. I took that on Feb. 24, and I started working as an EMT on March 9. Hello, Corona!” she said with a laugh.
Despite starting amid a global crisis, Machado seems delighted with her new line of work.
“I just love everything. I love working with people. I love helping them. I love, just — I don't know — work,” she said.“So it's never the same thing. It's never boring. Every day is something different. And yeah, I just absolutely love it. I wish I had known.”
International adventurer: Rob Barss
Rob Barss, another site lead at 62R Talbot, is the sort of person you might expect to find in the booth of a saloon in an old-fashioned movie regaling the locals with his stories. He bounces happily between tales of his adventures traveling the world in his youth (“I went all the way around the world for $2,200 once”) and his plans for the future. Despite his focus on what’s to come, he’s completely dedicated to his work at Tufts at present.
“My degree is in international relations, and I was always going to work for a non-governmental organization,” Barss said.
However, after getting married and settling down, Barss found himself working at a plant nursery. Barss has a passion for plants and gardening; every summer he enjoys turning his yard into a tropical paradise, but he had the desire to do more humanitarian work. When Barss turned 50, he began looking to gain professional experience that would allow him to work with Doctors Without Borders or Mercy Corps in his retirement. Working as an EMT — especially during a pandemic — he hopes to gain the skills he needs to help others around the world.
Barss’ desire to work abroad is rooted in a sense of adventure that he's had for years.
“I spent a great part of my 20s and 30s with a backpack and a plane ticket or a train ticket. I have passports stapled under passports. I would just go. I saw pictures of the Steppe of Mongolia. I'm like, 'I want to throw a frisbee [there],' so I hopped on a plane and a train and went to Mongolia to throw frisbees,” he said.
Barss said he prioritizes the human aspect of travel, preferring to spend time in smaller villages and getting to know the locals rather than visiting flashy tourist destinations. At 62R, he carries that same interest in connecting with people, and really tries to engage with the students he interacts with.
"I've gotten to know [the students], joke with them and have fun with them," Barss said. "I remember this one snowstorm [when] a whole bunch of guys that I recognized … [were] coming in. It was snowing, it was muddy, it was horrible. I’m like, ‘Guys! Take your shoes off.’ And they all stopped and were like ‘Oh my God!’ and I said ‘I’m kidding! I’m kidding … I’m glad to see you were brought up correctly, but I’m just kidding.' We'll have fun with them. They know me, I know them."
When Barss speaks about Tufts students, he seems genuinely filled with joy. After his interview with the Daily, Barss reached out again, worried that he had forgotten an important point. That point? How much he appreciates the effort of each student to keep campus safe during the pandemic.
Students helping students
Of course, not everyone working at 62R changed their career mid-life like Barss or Machado. Some, such as Tufts junior Melissa Barbosa or Boston University senior Sarah Horn, are pre-med students working at the testing center to explore careers in medicine. Partially because they’re not in oversight roles like Barss and Machado, Barbosa and Horn’s days can end up a little slow at times. Sometimes, this means that they’ll get some extra time to do schoolwork, but it can also mean that they have to go through the same tedious motions with dozens of students.
“It's a lot of the same conversations over and over again: ‘Hey, how are you? What's your birthday?’” Horn said. “What really helps is that some students are just so outgoing and so friendly.”
Horn tries to engage quieter students with talk about their birthdays and astrology.
“Someone will be born on July 17, and I'll say, 'that's the emoji birthday,'” she said, referencing the calendar emoji, which shows the date July 17. “I just said that to one kid, and he [said], ‘Wait, are you telling me they don’t personalize emojis for everyone’s birthday?’ I had to break that news to him, and that was funny.”
Asking for birthdays, of course, is one of the biggest parts of testing staff’s interaction with students. Barbosa said some staff members are hoping to set up a birthday bingo game to make the day more entertaining. The idea is that every time an employee checks a student in, they can check that student’s birthday off the bingo card, and whoever finished their card first gets a prize.
For Barbosa, one of the unique benefits of working in the testing center is getting to see people she knows. In a time when there’s no running into someone in the dining hall or finding yourself on serendipitous social outings with friends of friends, Barbosa feels lucky to work at 62R.
“It's just been nice to see people in passing that I haven't really been able to hang out with on a personal basis," she said.
In addition to people she knew prior to the pandemic, Barbosa has also gotten to know new faces through her work at the testing center. As she sees all of these faces streaming through the testing center, Barbosa thinks it’s important for everyone to remember the human side of the interaction.
“We're real people behind our mask," she said. "We've been there all day, and we're there for the students, so it's nice when people ask us, ‘How’s your day going?’ or when we make little jokes about people's birthdays. That's what we talk about all day, and it's just nice to have those short conversations with other people.”
Challenges and innovations
In addition to the potential for boredom, the staff and oversight team at 62R have faced other challenges over the past two semesters.
The tissues outside the testing center, for example, are an almost constant source of annoyance.
“One of the main things I do here is keep on putting tissues out. Tissues, tissues, tissues are the bane of my existence,” Barss joked.
According to Barss, students are asked to blow their noses before getting tested because the viral particles tend to linger deeper in the nose than the swap reaches. Blowing your nose before getting tested brings those particles closer to the swab and improves the test’s accuracy.
Of course, the management teams from Tufts and Brewster also have to deal with serious logistical concerns, which students may not always consider. For example, Julian Rosenwolf, operations coordinator for Tufts Conference and Events Services, described problems with the interior of the 62R Talbot testing center.
"I know that the carpet has been destroyed, and we had to figure out a way to change the carpet, while not disturbing all the testing … it’s still an issue," he said. "We’re going to either have to do it off hours when the center is not open, or we’ll have to change the setup, or we’ll have to figure out a way,” he said.
From a clinical standpoint, another issue is tests coming back with inconclusive results. For example, there can sometimes be too much material on the nose swabs.
"Some of the students are very, very generous with their donations,” Barss said.
Having too little material or getting blood on the swab can also cause problems. While sometimes the staff at the testing center can spot this when the vials are handed to them, issues with swabs are often difficult to detect.
Because of this, Barss said Tufts students have been working with the university to develop machines that can look at the samples and verify that they will be viable before they’re sent to the Broad Institute’s labs. While the device is still in its early stages, he’s hopeful it will help make the testing experience even smoother.
Finally, one of the initial hurdles at the start of the testing process was how students would be able to move quickly through the testing center. In response, Chris Sedore, Tufts’ chief information officer, thought of the system, now well known to students and faculty, where individuals tap their IDs to print out a label.
Brewster's Director of Operations Domenic “Dom” Corey said that without the ID system, students would have to check in through a much more time consuming manual process.
“[The ID system] is the single most important factor that revolutionized the flow through [the testing center]," Corey said. "[Without this system], you can triple the time it takes every single person that goes through there … [Students'] experience would be significantly more burdensome, and testing compliance rates would be lower.”
Appreciation for each other
It is the strong collaboration between everyone from Tufts' leadership and the Brewster Ambulance Service to the individual shift leads and staffers that keeps the testing center running smoothly. All employees showed a great appreciation for the work of their colleagues and recognized the importance of every individual role in maintaining a positive and efficient environment in the testing center.
“The folks that you see day in day out … our crew is absolutely incredible," Corey said. “We all love working with each other … [Tufts has] an incredible administrative team and leadership team that really cares about doing a good job and providing the best possible experience for the community. I can honestly say that with pride, I love working with them … It really sets Tufts apart.”
In a year marred by tragedies and challenges, the Tufts/Brewster testing team is full of passion and kindness. They’re excited to help others and make everyone’s day just a little bit better. As the university continues to navigate the pandemic, their positivity and appreciation for each other can be models for each of us.
