News Photo by Julie Riddle Cori Williams, family nurse practitioner for Thunder Bay Community Health Service, enters information into a patient’s chart at her Rogers City office on Tuesday.

ALPENA — There’s no going back to normal, residents and officials say.

Two years after health officials reported the first confirmed case of COVID-19 infection in Northeast Michigan, the coronavirus pandemic has left indelible marks on the lives and work of residents.

Since the area’s first confirmed case on April 6, 2020, the pandemic isolated the vulnerable, upended in-person learning, caused staffing shortages, and sent overloaded health care workers reeling.

As reported COVID-19 cases decrease, residents and officials say the pandemic also left some positives in its wake, including a better-prepared health care system and a community that rallied to support its businesses.

Dining at an Alpena restaurant with friends on Tuesday, Harrisville resident Dave Phinney said he doesn’t think the Alpena area will ever return to a pre-pandemic “normal.”

News Photo by Julie Riddle From left, Ruth Phinney, Dave Phinney, Craig MacNeill, and Paula MacNeill laugh together while having lunch at Big Boy restaurant in Alpena on Tuesday.

Then again, he said, cracking jokes with the others at the table, COVID-19 made people appreciate things they never appreciated before.

“Two years ago, we wouldn’t be laughing like this,” Phinney said. “We’d have had masks on.”

‘VERY REAL’

As a desk worker in the MyMichigan Medical Center Alpena respiratory department, Alpena resident Paula MacNeill saw the strained faces of doctors and nurses who cared for very sick COVID-19 patients.

Many people told her they didn’t believe in the virus, even after they got sick with it, she said.

“It’s very real,” said MacNeill, who lost a brother to the sickness in December.

The pandemic that has claimed the lives of nearly 300 Northeast Michiganders also hiked prices, sparked quarrels about masks, left people lonely, and made hired help impossible to find, said Phinney and his wife, Ruth Phinney, as they lunched with MacNeill and her husband at an Alpena restaurant on Tuesday.

Then again, said Ruth Phinney, the pandemic also brought out people’s kindness and compassion.

Though the foursome avoided their customary lunches together until recently, they have enjoyed getting back to handshakes and hugs in a world that seems to be easing back into pre-pandemic norms.

Residents need such touch and laughter, said Dave Phinney – because, after all, “We just went two years without no humor.”

‘BETTER PREPARED’

Two years of tough times prepared the health care system to be ready for next time, said Chuck Sherwin, president of MyMichigan Medical Center Alpena.

The first COVID-19 case reached Alpena in spring of 2020, but the hospital didn’t admit its first COVID-19-infected patient until October, Sherwin said.

Then, infection numbers soared, and the hospital regularly cared for 15 to 40 COVID-19-positive patients at a time.

Those patients stayed longer – often 10-14 days instead of the usual two- or three-day inpatient stay – and required more care than even very sick patients with other illnesses.

With the new virus killing people in alarming numbers, care workers constantly scrambled for new tactics to keep people alive, Sherwin said.

“You look out the window,” Sherwin said, “catch your breath for a minute, and think, ‘What else can we do?'”

The fight against COVID-19 has sparked some positive change, including the advancement of telehealth, Sherwin acknowledged.

Responding to the pandemic, designers modified the plans for the hospital’s new tower, set to open soon, to allow for a strong infectious disease response – because, Sherwin said, other pandemics could happen.

“We will have more,” he said. “But we will be better prepared in the future.”

KIDS AND STRESS

The medical community is currently seeing a wave of cancer diagnoses from people who went without screenings for the past two years, said Cori Williams, family nurse practitioner with Thunder Bay Community Health Service.

A striking number of children and teens come to her now seeking mental health help for anxiety and stress prompted by the pandemic, she said.

The global health crisis also normalized discussions of mental health and pushed schools and other organizations to provide help, said Lee Fitzpatrick, director of communications for Alpena Public Schools.

After 24 months of intermittent virtual education, classroom quarantines, and in-classroom mask requirements, schools are as close to normal as they’ve been in two years, Fitzpatrick said.

Disrupted classrooms set some students back educationally, teachers know. Those teachers, largely because of the pandemic, also have new skills in technology use that can be put to work helping those students, Fitzpatrick said.

COMMUNITY SUPPORT

Economically, the region stands on stable and even hopeful ground despite many forced temporary closures in 2020. An employee shortage stands in the way of a smooth transition back to “normal,” however, economic leaders say.

Only a handful of local businesses closed because of the pandemic, said Mike Mahler, Alpena economic development director.

Several local development projects took root during the height of the pandemic, including a proposal to build a hotel downtown and the purchase of property to build a new coffee shop and urgent care facility, Mahler said.

Many of the Alpena businesses that survived the worst days of the pandemic now can’t find employees to fill open positions, said Adam Poll, Alpena Area Chamber of Commerce president.

A housing shortage means people willing to move to Alpena to work can’t find houses, and newcomers choosing to live in Alpena while working remotely from their urban jobs have made that shortage worse, Poll said.

A coalition of Alpena-area leaders is working to fix the housing problem, which should, in turn, help employers find more workers, Poll said.

Meanwhile, some downtown businesses told Mahler they had their best year ever in 2021.

Such successes could stem, he surmised, from a community that rallied around its businesses when times were toughest, deliberately shopping and dining local to keep their neighbors’ stores and restaurants alive.

“People do have short memories,” he said, “but I hope this sticks around.”

TOOLS FOR NEXT TIME

As health care providers, schools, businesses, and other aspects of Northeast Michigan life ease toward a new version of what once passed as normal – scarred by the pandemic but also, in some ways, improved by it – the community as a whole now knows what to do in another such crisis, said Josh Meyerson, medical director for District Health Department No. 4.

Unlike the scramble at the outset of the pandemic, when even first responders didn’t have enough personal protective equipment to go around and no vaccine was on the horizon, “We now have tools to protect ourselves,” he said.

COVID-19 cases will spike again, he predicted.

“We might be done with it, but the virus is not done with us,” Meyerson said. “We need to be ready for it whenever it comes.”