KI staff, students, and alumni tell of their lives during the pandemic

New routines  are currently in place at Huddinge Academic Health Centre and the local infection node. Doctors examine patients while keeping a distance to prevent the spread of infection.

When dealing with suspected corona patients, we wear face masks, visors and plastic aprons and gloves.

The patients are received in a well-ventilated room that is disinfected and aired out between patients.

We’ve done as Region Stockholm has ruled and closed off the section of the health centre where the infection unit is.

Patients who are generally unwell are referred to the local acute hospital, while those with upper respiratory tract symptoms such as a persistent cough and fever are booked into the infection node and come and go through a special doorway where they’re kept separated from other patients and through which only staff wearing PPE can pass.

My expected fate, one Monday morning in March five weeks ago. I felt tired and something was up with my airways, just taking a few easy steps into the kitchen left me out of breath. Had I got this mysterious virus, is this the beginning of the end? Nothing felt normal any more, hard to accept. Me, who’s been blessed with a strong constitution and who hasn’t had flu for, what, 30 years. And now it was all isolation and acceptance. Got some kit delivered that made it occasionally possible link up and do some work for a bit. At times I felt much better and thought I was on the road to recovery, until it suddenly returned like a weight pressing against my chest. The symptoms came and went in waves, and I’m still unsure if I have, or have had, the virus.

This insatiable virus forbids us from touching anything, even our own faces. Especially when you come out of your isolation for a short walk. Don’t touch this, don’t touch that, our contactless civilisation is making huge leaps, our minds are being turned upside down.

I’ll never forget this month when the spring came and the sun shone almost every day, and when the clouds tried to darken the brought blue sky, the wind made sure to keep them away. From the window of my new apartment, the spring weather has put on a show with flowers and budding vegetation, a white fairytale of fruit trees and magnolia. The birds sing with joy and freedom, drowning out the now plane-less sky.

Everything comes to a stop except the apprehension, and the green ingress to the spring and early summer of Stockholm 2020 that elicits a desire to go camping, have a picnic or take a hike in the country. As if COVID-19 drew an invisible line across the country, a line of demarcation like the Maginot Line, no defence. Suddenly everything changed, I had to think of my routines: social distancing, no handshakes, meticulous hand hygiene with water, soap and hand sanitizer. An atmosphere of scarcity. What’s lacking isn’t toilet paper or food, it’s the preceding carelessness. By respecting an interval with our neighbour, we say a social distance.

I take my afternoon walk after having worked for a while at my computer. I usually take the same route around Gärdet, via Hundudden and along the narrow almost forgotten paths by Djurgårdsbrunn, I see a detour, another human being, I execute an arc to make sure to keep my possibly infected droplets out of range, and take my sidesteps with a determined smile under my face mask, as if to say that it’s not personal, just necessary, is this my new natural life?

Karin Ekström, president’s secretary

I’m on the 10^th semester of the medical programme and in the past few weeks I’ve been helping to import material from China on behalf of the regional crisis group.

On 18 March I was asked by a former colleague in A&E: “We need emergency material for a lab. Would that be doable via China?” She asked me this because I was once an entrepreneur in China, although it wasn’t anything to do with medical material. Three weeks later the first delivery appears in the lab’s goods reception area. 5,000 test kits with swabs and tubes filled with a liquid that will stabilise the RNA from virus so that it can be run through PCR (polymerase chain reaction), a method that makes it possible to detect and isolate viruses. Another 15,000 kits arrive the following day and a further 40,000 are waiting in a warehouse in Guangzhou.

For me, this wasn’t actually about whether or not I’d be able to get hold of the material, it was about the choice between working extra in intensive care and prioritising testing material. I opted for the latter. There are hundreds of great students of nursing and medicine who can work in intensive care, but finding factories in China is rather more niche.

The following days were hectic. China wakes up six hours before Sweden, so early mornings with updates about what had happened there during the morning became routine. Former colleagues in China who’d never even considered medical material, now had to travel around visiting factories to make sure everything was in order. Finally Karolinska University Library placed an initial order for 100,000 test swabs. Questions needed answering and it was all very much based on trust. I think that in times like this it’s especially important that we can trust each other, and try novel methods and means to get the job done. In this case it was worth it. So far 20,000 test kits have been delivered and hundreds of thousands are on their way.

Svante Jerling, medical student

At the moment I’m sitting here answering students’ questions while they’re doing a test in the form of a quiz. I feel there’s a need for consensus around the use of digital tests, and would look forward to an inspiring discussion on different ways of doing them and to being able to share my experiences, good as well as not so good, with others. So I’d like to see more general discussion in this forum and think that it’d be rewarding. I’d love to hear from you!

Annika Botes, clinical supervisor, CNS

What I love most about my work at KI is meeting face to face with managers, staff and students. Now after three weeks working from home I’m far from professional – but half-decent at holding meetings via Teams and Zoom. I’ve even done a couple of courses in cyberspace and they went well thanks to the patience and positive attitude of the participants (a techno-freak I’ll never be). Work environment rules have a low hip-factor but maybe going digital will make them cool...

Joking aside, my own work at the moment involves contributing to and supporting the risk assessments that are being done to minimise the risk of infection in different kinds of activity at KI. It’s in difficult situations that we really need to prove that we have, or can quickly set up, the work environments and safe methods required.

I have great respect for everyone working tirelessly and professionally to make sure that we and the world exit this pandemic relatively unscathed. I also think a lot about how we as a society will operate afterwards. And I can’t wait to meet IRL – even if a digital chat over a coffee is just fine too.

Margareta Bratt Carlström, HR specialist at the HR Office, UF

Those of us who don’t have any students to assist now have to make preparations for future student work instead. The other day, some colleagues and I were given a different kind of task to do – to collect all the leftover PPE for delivery to hospitals. 5,000 masks, 30,000 gloves, 5,000 plastic aprons, 50 litres of surface disinfectant and 175 long-sleeved gowns, all got sent to Södertälje Hospital at Region Stockholm’s request. It was a lovely feeling to do some good in all that’s going on with the virus pandemic.

Otherwise, the adaptations we’ve had to do have felt unreal and a little sad. The rooms that should be buzzing with activity are empty. But if we’re to see the silver lining in all this, it’ll hammer home the importance of hygiene routines, something that we dental nurses always stick to.

Marie-Louise Bjerdahl, dental nurse at the academic clinic for the prevention and  treatment of dental disease.

The nursing section of the Department of Neurobiology, Care Sciences and Society (NVS) arranges most of the courses on the nursing and specialist nursing programmes. We have, in round figures, 1,300 students a year in circulation. Even under normal circumstances we play a serious and important societal role – namely to secure a steady supply of skilled nurses – but this is especially the case now!

We’re currently gathering together all the section staff once a week to go through information, to check and double-check things with each other and discuss. The photo is from one such meeting. I led the meeting from home last week and 70 of our 80 members of staff turned up.

Since we at the section have long experience of working with digital education and teaching, the concept of a digital forum is familiar to us. What I do miss, however, is being at KI and meeting people like we used to, in the corridor or by popping into each other’s office.

I’m so grateful to all my colleagues and to KI and the NVS management for thinking outside the box, and for their clear, transparent and prompt information and for being easily accessible at this very special time. And – I’m grateful above all to all our patient students.

Ann Langius-Eklöf, professor of nursing and head of section at NVS