How the National Guard became teachers, janitors and more as omicron hit essential workers

Other Guard members, once deployed to Kuwait and Afghanistan, were wiping down stairs, wheeling patients between rooms and rushing test swabs to the lab.

Twenty-four-year-old Yi Ting Lin — who graduated into the pandemic with a degree in national security and intelligence — was fielding a patient’s questions about gravy.

“Good to be well-rounded,” Lin said later, smiling, her eyes still trained on the computer that helped her track people’s dietary rules and meal orders. A piece of paper on the wall urged workers to keep busy: “Everyone Wrap silverware in spare time!” But the phones in their tiny side-room kept ringing.

“Another call,” Guard member Jacob Mathew told a colleague a few paces away from Lin. “Another call. Another call.”

For nearly two years now, the National Guard has been on the front lines of a continuous crisis fighting covid-19 and its fallout — contact-tracing, manning test sites, answering unemployment hotlines, vaccinating millions of Americans and now trying to fill the gaps at health care centers like J.W. Ruby Memorial Hospital, where Lin and two dozen fellow Guard members arrived late last month for the virus’s latest surge. As a state-based branch of the military, Guard members train while studying or working civilian jobs and serve as needed — sometimes deployed to combat missions overseas, sometimes sent to emergencies at home such as wildfires, hurricanes or civil unrest.

There are few limits on what they can do, and their roles have expanded as the pandemic reshapes what it means to protect national security. The Guard’s latest wave of assignments shows how the omicron variant slammed crucial parts of the U.S. workforce, with employees calling out sick in droves.

Delaware recently put Guard members through a two-week crash course to become certified nursing assistants. New Mexico Guard members are substituting as teachers and helping at child care centers. Around the country, hospitals hit with both staff shortages and bigger caseloads say they are desperate for workers of all kinds, not just medical staff but also people to stock shelves, cook food and clean floors.

Current coronavirus hospitalizations in the United States have dropped significantly after reaching an all-time peak last month, an average of nearly 160,000. But many states are still struggling with an influx of patients. In West Virginia — where about 43 percent of the population is not fully vaccinated, much less boosted — current hospitalizations are down from a record high of 1,302 reported on Feb. 1, but still far from pre-omicron levels.

As the omicron variant pushed daily coronavirus cases to new heights last month, the West Virginia National Guard put hundreds of its members through basic training for health care work. By Jan. 19, 15 hospitals had sought their help. By last week Guard members were stationed at 35 hospitals and long-term care centers around the state.

Lin, the call center staffer, jumped into covid-19 missions full-time after graduating from college early in 2020 — a muted milestone she did not even mark with photos. At first, Lin said, she sewed masks. Then she set up testing lanes. Then she helped give out vaccines.

Ten minutes down the road from her work station at Ruby Memorial last week, a billboard flashed between anti-vaccine messages and pleas for more hospital workers.

“Up to $20K Sign-On Bonus!” a health system enticed. “JOIN OUR TEAM.” Not far away, near a McDonald’s, another sign was seeking nurses for WVU Medicine, the West Virginia University health system that includes Ruby Memorial.

Lin marveled at how the Guard’s work fighting the pandemic has shape-shifted and dragged on.

“I had no idea it was going to last this long,” she said.

‘There aren’t any other options’

The coronavirus quickly combined with nationwide unrest in 2020 to trigger the Guard’s largest domestic response in recent years, surpassing the more than 50,000 people activated after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

By the summer of 2021, with vaccines widely available, some officials said they believed the Guard’s work was almost done. One news release predicted an end to Nevada forces’ coronavirus operations by September: “Nevada National Guard enters final stages of COVID battle,” it declared.

Then the hyper-transmissible delta and omicron variants sent hospitals into crisis mode and sidelined staff across sectors. More than 19,000 Guard members were responding to covid-19 last week, the service said, and the federal government is funding states’ use of Guard members to respond through at least the beginning of April.

It is not clear when the Guard’s pandemic missions may end, and National Guard Bureau Chief Daniel R. Hokanson acknowledged at a news briefing last year that “we’re not really sure” what the future holds.

A reporter had asked if the demands of 2020 marked “a new normal” — with service members stationed in dozens of countries over one weekend while also spread across testing sites, food banks, protests, wildfires, missile defense sites and more in the United States.

“What we try and tell our folks is … we go back to our motto, ‘always ready, always there,’ ” Hokanson said. “We don’t know what — what we’re going to be asked to do but we’ve got to be ready to do that.”

Some Guard members have medical skills, but states are wary of diverting people from civilian jobs in health care.

“If we did pull in our military-trained nurses … we’d be robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Maj. W. Chris Clyne with the Oregon National Guard, which ordered about 1,500 people into hospitals in August with a focus on nonclinical “support” jobs. A second wave of 1,200 Oregon Guard members went out to hospitals last month to help fight omicron.

Pennsylvania Guard member Han Thach, who is trained as a combat medic, has jumped between nursing homes for more than a year after arriving to her first assignment in January 2021. She has learned how to roll residents over, how to change them and how to use a Hoyer lift for people who could not move their legs. Guard members do simple but important tasks, she said, like taking people to the restroom or just passing out water. Pennsylvania military officials say they have been in long-term care facilities since April 2020.

With nurses “understaffed and overwhelmed,” Thach said, “I know a lot of the residents feel that they’re not getting the care that they should.”

A couple of months ago, Thach said, she watched over a woman in hospice care with the coronavirus who would not eat and could not communicate beyond a shake of her head. “We knew it was her time to go,” Thach said.

The woman was dead by the time her family was able to come say goodbye, Thach said.

New Mexico made headlines for calling the Guard into less conventional positions this winter. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) last month announced a first-in-the-nation program encouraging them to get licensed quickly as substitute teachers and child care employees. More than 80 Guard members were doing education support in the state last week, officials say.

The scramble to fill school positions was nothing new — some districts have turned to parents and board members. But the idea of uniformed soldiers and airmen showing up in classrooms was an especially striking sign of how the pandemic has scrambled the workforce, an echo of Massachusetts’s efforts last fall to enlist Guard members as school bus drivers.

Whitney Holland, president of the American Federation of Teachers New Mexico, thanked officials in a statement for “thinking outside of the box.”

“There aren’t any other options,” Lujan Grisham said on CNN.

‘It’s got to get done’

All of the Guard members at Ruby Memorial Hospital volunteered for the mission rather than being called into mandatory service. Beyond that, their backgrounds diverge.

Some are doing work not too different from their civilian jobs at home: A McDonald’s employee is prepping meals for patients, and a longtime warehouse worker is carting medical supplies around ceiling-high piles of boxes in the middle of the night, looking for the right shelves. Others — a wedding photographer or a General Motors employee — are jumping into more foreign territory.

Many of them have left spouses and young children around West Virginia to live just across the street from this college-town hospital, at a Residence Inn.

“It’s pretty filthy,” 20-year-old Chandler Absher said of his work in the laundry plant during a brief break. “But it’s got to get done.” That got a laugh from Maj. Josh Poling with the public affairs office.

“You tell ’em to do something, they’ll do it,” Poling said. “That’s the great thing about the military.”

Staff all around Ruby Memorial were eager for the help. The director for laundry said that at one point a quarter of his workforce was missing. The director of nutrition services said the coronavirus hit his employees harder than ever last month — a dozen people were out at once, he said, and parts of the cafeteria were shut down. Valerie Boley, the director of emergency services, said some departments have hired only half of the workers they need amid sick leaves, a national nurse shortage and a hiring war over people offered lucrative travel gigs.

“But for right now I’ve been over here training and helping because we’ve been so short staffed,” he said as he got ready for an overnight shift.

Danielle Whetzel, who had just dashed out for a delivery, recalled one Saturday where snow and staff illnesses meant she and one other person fielded supply requests across the hospital.

“I’ve had to take the phone … the telephone where the units call down for stuff that they need right now,” Whetzel said. “ … They’re just calling and calling and calling and calling, and the only thing you can do is just keep on going.”

Angela Jones-Knopf, a spokeswoman for WVU Medicine, said the number of Ruby Memorial patients with coronavirus has been rising over the past couple weeks. About 80 percent of those hospitalized with the virus are unvaccinated, she said.

Guard members wear their fatigues around the hospital in part because they believe it boosts morale. Visitors thank them for their service. “Dog tired” staff sometimes see them and smile, said Guard member David Coe: “Everything from the little head nod, to — people come up and, you know, touch me on the shoulder.”

Coe, who once was an Arabic linguist with the Marine Corps, said he joined the National Guard as a medic. He wanted to work in health care and dropped ranks, he said, to switch to a specialty in which he had “no skills.”

“After a couple of years of seeing the world come apart, I kind of wanted to be in a place where I get to put some little bits back together,” he said, the main lobby finally quiet for the evening as he mopped.

A handful of the Guard members at Ruby Memorial have personal experience with covid-19′s awful toll. Andrew Ferrebee, 31, lost an aunt about two months ago. Katlyn Valencia, 25, said covid-19 took both of her grandparents. Her grandma went to the hospital thinking she would just get some medicine, Valencia said, “and before you know it, she’s on the ventilator.”

The virus also left Valencia’s sister, a caretaker, struggling with heart irregularity and shortness of breath.

“It’s changed her,” Valencia said. “She’s 25 years old, and it’s changed her.”

Demirjian reported from Washington. Michael S. Williamson contributed to this report.