Epidemiologist Richard Danila has legal pads in his office with the names of nearly every Minnesota killed by COVID-19 -- more than 7,600 to date. 'I did it to slow myself down, because every single line is a real person, someone loved,' he says. MPRnews
Richard Danila has a stack of legal pads in his office with the handwritten names of nearly every Minnesota death in the pandemic.
The state’s deputy epidemiologist with a 30-year-plus career at the Minnesota Department of Health, Danila said he writes down the name of each person who’s died of COVID-19 as a personal ritual he developed to process the tragedy playing out around him. "It's basically a puzzle we have to put together,” said Leslie Kollmann, co-lead of the mortality review unit who previously investigated unexplained deaths like SIDS in newborns. "And if we don't have all the pieces, we have to go find the pieces.”Sometimes those clues are in autopsy reports or medical records, she said.
Danila and his team spent years preparing for the possibility of a pandemic. For instance, Danila said they predicted we would need social distancing and remote learning to limit the spread, and planned for both."Never did we think about or consider that masking would somehow be political or [there would be] accusations that we were ginning up the statistics,” he said. “It just never dawned on us.
Kollmann has investigated unexplained deaths for a long time. But she said COVID-19 investigations are nothing like her old job because there are so many of them at once.
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