Claire Hartloge

Q: Today is Wednesday, March 9, 2022. This is Mary Hilpertshauser for the COVID-19 Oral History and Memory Archive Project. I will be talking with Claire Hartloge. We are in the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] Broadcast Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. Claire, welcome to the project.

HARTLOGE: Thanks.

Q: Do I have your permission to interview you and record this session?

HARTLOGE: Yes, you do.

Q: Claire, can you tell me a little bit about your role here at CDC?

HARTLOGE: I recently joined in a new role as a biologist with the diagnostic reference team in the laboratory branch of the Division of Viral Hepatitis.

Q: Gotcha. All right. Now we're going to go back in time. Can you tell me a little bit about your family background and the community you grew up in?

HARTLOGE: I grew up in the military community, so it required a lot of moving around. Background, lived in Italy for a little bit, lived in Virginia, primarily, moved to Guam--lots of moving around, lots of changing of my 00:01:00environment. But eventually ended up in Southeast Georgia for high school.

Q: Okay, what year--I'm not going to ask you what year that was, but okay.

HARTLOGE: I wouldn't be able to answer that if you did.

Q: Okay, so you finally landed in southeast Georgia. Where is that?

HARTLOGE: It's King's Bay area--it's just above Jacksonville, Florida.

Q: Okay. All right, and so you went to high school there. What was the high school?

HARTLOGE: Camden County High School.

Q: What were your interests during high school?

HARTLOGE: I had interest in working with animals and trying to volunteer with, you know, a couple veterinary clinics there, and then volunteering with the zoo down in Jacksonville as well.

Q: What got you interested in animal science and animals in zoos and the like?

HARTLOGE: Just working with them, it was one of the few times that waking up at five o'clock in the morning didn't seem like a bad idea.

Q: Was there something that happened during your early--did you have animals? Did you have pets, or the lack of pets from moving around?

HARTLOGE: Oh, we always had pets, whenever we moved, we left them with family and friends that were still stateside. I'm not sure what initially got me interested, but animals were always kind of cool, and so--

Q: All right. Then what happened after high school?

HARTLOGE: After high school I decided to try and pursue a possible career in the veterinary field. I ended up going to Berry College for animal science, with a chemistry minor to help set me up for that.

Q: Berry College is where?

HARTLOGE: It's in Rome, Georgia.

Q: Okay, so northeast, okay.

HARTLOGE: Or northwest.

Q: Northwest--oh, you're right. You're interested in vet school, and what's happening in Berry College?

HARTLOGE: That was for my undergrad, and I had a lot of research with the professors. I loved the material. But I went to go submit the packet that you do for any graduate-type program, which requires you to write why you should go to vet school, what makes you the perfect candidate to go, and I couldn't write it. I pulled my application a couple days before it was due, and then had, you know, a midlife crisis at the age of, what, twenty-one? Just trying to figure out where I was going to go from there, so I ended up applying to a position at CDC through connections at Berry. There's a lot of Berry graduates here, and so tried to apply to a position, didn't hear anything back immediately, and a year later I ended up getting a call and joining.

Q: What year is that?

HARTLOGE: I graduated in 2015 and I started at CDC in the summer of 2016.

Q: Was that a fellowship, or was it a contractorship, or--how did you come to CDC?

HARTLOGE: I started as a fellow, an ORISE [Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education] fellow, which was a great learning opportunity--it's kind of what the program's for, is to learn and train. Then I maxed out my five years--you get up to five years, and so I went all five, and then swapped over to a contractor with the same branch for a little bit, and then I ended up where I'm at now.

Q: Where is that?

HARTLOGE: Now, or--?

Q: Right now, yes.

HARTLOGE: Now is the Division of Viral Hepatitis.

Q: Okay. Before that you were in the Poxvirus/Rabies branch.

HARTLOGE: Yes. Before I was in the Poxvirus and Rabies, on the immunodiagnostics 00:05:00and proteomics team.

Q: Right. Explain what that is.

HARTLOGE: Just, like, a diagnostics team. We just do the testing for rabies and poxviruses, but I primarily just did rabies.

Q: Okay. Rabies and poxvirus is, like, smallpox and cowpox and--

HARTLOGE: Yes. All of those.

Q: --camel pox--

HARTLOGE: Monkeypox and--

Q: Are the pox viruses and rabies, are they similar? Or is it just because they're animal-borne?

HARTLOGE: Yes, they weren't originally in the same branch together and then they kind of got lumped later in life, so.

Q: Okay, all right. We're up to 2021 right now?

HARTLOGE: Is that what year we're in? Oh, currently?

Q: Well, in five years.

HARTLOGE: Yes, 2021 is when I started in the Division of Viral Hepatitis, yes.

Q: Okay. While this transition is happening, we're starting to go into a pandemic. It's 2020. You were in laboratory group. Did you have any kind of 00:06:00experience working with COVID-19 samples or anything like that?

HARTLOGE: When the pandemic first began, I was still over in the Poxvirus and Rabies group and had no experience working with the types of samples that you would see for COVID-19 for testing.

Q: Because it was an influenza kind of type thing?

HARTLOGE: Yes. Rabies is primarily brain samples, animal brain samples and stuff, and clinical samples, and then for COVID you're seeing more nasal swabs and stuff like that.

Q: Did your branch jump in and start helping with the testing?

HARTLOGE: Our branch didn't. Our branch did help with testing from other state public health labs, because all the state public health labs swapped to primarily doing COVID-19 testing, so our branch did have to step up with doing 00:07:00more diagnostic testing for rabies, and--but they didn't do any of the COVID testing themselves.

Q: Okay, so you had to take over for the states for rabies testing, because they could do it in their--but they were overwhelmed by COVID?

HARTLOGE: Yes, they were overwhelmed by COVID, and therefore so instead of being just a reference laboratory for rabies testing, we ended up being a primary testing facility for some states as well.

Q: You worked in a STAT lab. Is that part of rabies, or is that part of the new viral --?

HARTLOGE: STAT Lab is--I've never worked in STAT Lab, but the STAT Lab is who accepts all samples of CDC. That's where all the samples come in.

Q: The STAT Lab is Specimen Triage Tracking Team.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Once again an acronym.

HARTLOGE: Lots of acronyms at the CDC.

Q: That's the initial triage when specimens come into CDC.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: That team will triage those specimens and then send them to the appropriate labs.

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: Tell me more about where you were right then. 2021, you were kind of transitioning--you're not really doing COVID work? Or you are doing COVID work?

HARTLOGE: I began doing COVID work in May of 2020.

Q: Were you deployed?

HARTLOGE: Yes. Their--at the very beginning of the pandemic with the response, they typically have just FTEs [full-time equivalent] that can be responders. In about May is when they opened it up to fellows and contractors as well, and since I was at home a lot of the time, as a lot of us were, I jumped at the opportunity and asked my team lead, and he was more than okay with letting me go 00:09:00to the response. I ended up going down to the--what was then the triage and reporting laboratory: TRL.

Q: Okay, so you were--when COVID hit, which hit in March, typically, we were told CDC was shut down and most essential workers were sent home to do their work from home, and you were part of that?

HARTLOGE: Yes. Yes.

Q: Then you applied to be a deployer, and you came back into the labs. When was that?

HARTLOGE: Came back into the labs late May [2020].

Q: Okay, great. What happened there? You worked where?

HARTLOGE: I came back to the triage and reporting laboratory, TRL, which is now COORS, which is Core Operations Outbreak Response and Support Laboratory. All the acronyms are quite a mouthful sometimes. Ended up going down there and helping in the lab space. I was an ELIMS [Enterprise Laboratory Information 00:10:00Management System] super-user, which is our database management system. They needed that kind of expertise, and so I was able to help out a lot down there. I started down there and I kind of never left for a while. Ended up being down there for about six months, until November of 2020. I took like three weeks off, I think, at one point, but that was about six months I was down there total.

Q: When you say, "down there," what does that mean? In the--is it in a basement, or--?

HARTLOGE: It is on the bottom floor of Building Eighteen, but I was just in a different building. Anything lower --

Q: Where you were was down there. Okay. All right. What were you doing was working the ELIMS system for this group?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Okay, so they're getting in their swabs and you are collecting the 00:11:00information that comes from the testing?

HARTLOGE: When samples come to CDC--

Q: I think you explained that.

HARTLOGE: When samples come to CDC--

Q: These are COVID samples.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Oh, okay. We were getting samples because--why were we getting the samples? State health departments?

HARTLOGE: State health departments were getting samples, but any studies that were going on that CDC was conducting, we would get those samples directly. Any reference-type samples that a state public health file couldn't get a clear, defined answer on, we would get--it kind of depends on what was needed at the time. It was a very fluid environment.

Q: Well, it was hard to figure out what it was early on. It's an emerging infectious disease, and--

HARTLOGE: Exactly.

Q: --and what is it? You were part of helping to define what it is.

HARTLOGE: Yes. Samples come to CDC, they went through STAT Lab, they then got transferred over to our lab from them, down to the TRL of course. We handle all 00:12:00the specimens in the ELIMS database, look at them to make sure there is accuracy in the information, that the tube matches the actual information, all that verification and quality control. Then we go and take those into our BSL-2 Plus [Biosafety Level 2 Plus] environment.

Q: You are going to have to explain BSL-2 Plus.

HARTLOGE: That takes our clinical samples, or clinical specimens, and requires a PAPR [Powered Air-Purifying Respirator], hood, everything.

Q: A PAPR is?

HARTLOGE: A personal air--

Q: PR.

HARTLOGE: I did not write that one down.

Q: That's okay. We'll figure out what PAPR is later, but it is a personal air--

HARTLOGE: It's a hood that's attached--yes, it gives you personal air that's filtered. We donned the PAPR and our gown, gloves, and anything we touched 00:13:00within that lab we obviously deconned [decontaminated] and removed before we came back out of that lab. We took our clinical specimens and verified the information in the hood. Any time we were opening up any kind of box or sample, it's always done inside the BSC.

Q: BSC?

HARTLOGE: Biological Safety Cabinet.

Q: Okay, so those big silver cabinets that have air flow that goes away from the worker.

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: Okay, I got you.

HARTLOGE: We bring those samples in there; we have to inactivate them before we put them--take them out of the lab space in order to run the test for extraction. That requires using, like, a lysis buffer or heat in activation sometimes; it depends on how you're extracting the RNA [ribonucleic acid]. But we verified the samples, put them on a plate or put them in a different tube, 00:14:00inactivate them, bring them out and put them on our extraction platforms.

Q: Those extraction platforms are what?

HARTLOGE: We had a couple of--we had an EZ1, a Qiagen EZ1 extraction platform. We had a MagNA Pure--had a MagnNA Pure Ninety-six. It's a giant machine.

Q: Ninety-six samples, or--?

HARTLOGE: Yes. Ninety-six is for the ninety-six wells that you can do. But we also have controls that have to go with each run, so you can run anywhere from one sample to possibly up to, what--ninety or so samples.

Q: Physically, when the sample comes in and you're done, you're all gowned and you can't--you're extracting it from the tube, inactivating it and putting it into another tube, and then it goes into this machine, where it does--what?

HARTLOGE: It does an RNA extraction in this lab.

Q: How does that happen? Does the machine do it? It's all magical? Or--

HARTLOGE: Pretty much, yes.

Q: Ooh, okay. This machine will extract the RNA, and that RNA will tell you--

HARTLOGE: After we get the RNA, we then transfer that to one of the other labs that was doing PCR [polymerase chain reaction].

Q: PCR. We've heard so much about PCR. That is one of those--because I'm sure PCR testing was something else before this all happened. Can you explain to us the basics of PCR testing?

HARTLOGE: Our RTPCR which is real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction--another mouthful--it's a nuclear-derived method for detecting the presence of specific genetic material, like a virus or a pathogen. That involves, at least on the laboratorian side, involves adding a buffer and 00:16:00primers and probes with your sample, or your RNA, in this case, putting it on a machine. It does its magic, and then it gives you an amplification curve, and then also how that comes out is through a CT [cycle threshold] value. It gives you kind of a graph along with a value that gives you--correlates to a result.

Q: Okay. How accurate are these tests?

HARTLOGE: They're pretty accurate.

Q: Okay. That was like the gold standard of testing if someone had COVID-19.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: This didn't include turning on variant--like, finding the variants? Was that part of this machine, or this--

HARTLOGE: No.

Q: --just early on, it was just COVID?

HARTLOGE: Yes. Early on it was just "Is this COVID? Yes/no." The PCR can then be--go to whole genome sequencing, which is where you kind of find out if it's 00:17:00this variant or this variant. You can kind of figure that out.

Q: Excellent. Okay. After that, all of--you were working there for how many weeks or months, doing that?

HARTLOGE: I worked on TRL, which primarily did just the extraction, from May of 2020 until November of 2020. I eventually added on more roles as I stayed down there.

Q: Well, we'll get to those. Tell me what it's like on a daily basis. You come in to work at, what, seven in the morning, and you leave when?

HARTLOGE: That is a hit or miss. Sometimes your day is a standard eight-hour day, and then some days you're there for twelve hours. It kind of depends. I think at our biggest influx during a study, we had over eight hundred samples coming in within three days, which required all hands on deck. We have to look 00:18:00at every single one of those samples, verify the information, go through this process, and they wanted those--because it was a CLIA study, it required us to report out results on a rather quick basis, and so we had to be in lab for [unclear] results to verify everything, and so it was a quick turnaround. Those days required some long hours.

Q: Okay, so what was CLIA again?

HARTLOGE: Clinical Laboratory something. Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments.

Q: Okay. Typically, how long does it take you to process a sample or a group of samples? From start to finish. It comes in, you check it, you're extracting--

HARTLOGE: Depends on the person. Some people are a lot quicker. I am not one of those. I'm great at the computer and doing our ELIMS system--little slower than 00:19:00some people who are used to doing plates in a lot of samples, but--

Q: That comes with practice over time, yes?

HARTLOGE: Correct, yes.

Q: You're new to this.

[SNEEZE]

HARTLOGE: It can take anywhere from fifteen, twenty minutes to hours in the hood. Sometimes some people just stayed in that BSL-2 Plus space nonstop, just processing, processing, processing samples. So that, because we had certain people that were really great and were great at processing plates and getting it done quicker--other people would be outside of the room, prepping the machines, because it requires putting on tips and reagents and all sorts of things, so that the machine can do what it does. Then preparing samples in ELIMS and getting ready to transfer them, uploading aliquots and sub-samples and making 00:20:00sure our ELIMS database showed all of that.

Q: It was a tag-team kind of effort?

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: All right. That's a lot of samples in three days. But that happened, right?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Okay. What else did you start taking on then?

HARTLOGE: When I first started, I was primarily down there as an ELIMS super-user. Then I began getting trained in the testing personnel, so I could also help out in the BSL-2 Plus space and running samples. I took on those two roles, and then eventually I became the first post-analytical study coordinator. We had a lot of studies going on, and a lot of studies required different things, required being transferred to different labs. It got confusing a little 00:21:00quick, and so we ended up having somebody that just took on that role of understanding where everything goes--what lab it goes to, how much samples are needed in each lab, and kind of being in charge of that.

Q: Sort of air-traffic controller?

HARTLOGE: Pretty much, yes.

Q: Okay, that's a lot. How did you--I mean, you had the ELIMS that did the--how many studies were coming in, and were they all CDC studies or were they somebody else's studies? Were we just doing CDC's work?

HARTLOGE: I believe it was a mixture of studies. We were working with a lot of people, obviously, during the pandemic, and so any of those types of studies came through--we had studies all over the nation going on. I think at one time we probably had twenty to twenty-five different studies going on? That's starting up or wrapping up or in the middle of it, and each of those studies has different requirements on how many samples are coming in, if they're CLIA or 00:22:00non-CLIA, so if they need results reported out, they can change very much depending on what study--you could get one or two samples a week, or you could get hundreds in a couple days.

Q: How did they contact you? Say, if I had a study--so I would just say, "Hey, Claire, I've got a study, can you help me out?" How does that work? How does it come in? Who gets to say, "I have a study and you guys get to run it?"

HARTLOGE: None of us in the lab. We get told, "This is a study and we're going to test this." All the different task force--there's a whole laboratory task force of part of COVID, and so the TRL lab was just one portion of that overarching task force. They kind of--the upper echelon of people decided which studies were being controlled, which ones would come, what they 00:23:00need to be done with them, so.

Q: Okay. I can't run my study--I have to go through them. You're in this ELIMS system, and you're a super-user. What defines you as a super-user?

HARTLOGE: It means that I understand the system a little bit, and hopefully I can fix any problems that arise.

Q: What is it--I mean, is it just a program on a computer, or--and all these machines feed into and give you data, and then you arrange it somehow?

HARTLOGE: Actually, I have what ELIMS stands for somewhere.

Q: It's the Enterprise Laboratory Information Management System, is it that one?

HARTLOGE: ELIMS--before COVID, I worked with it in rabies. For us in rabies it just primarily was used for accessioning samples, reporting out some results. It 00:24:00did some of the sample management. Then I was a super-user in what capacity we needed it for, in rabies. The COVID-19 response was a completely different ballgame and required a lot more of the system. The ELIMS system is kind of neat because you can tailor it to what the lab needs, based off of what that lab's actually doing. For this particular lab, it required taking in the samples, creating sub-samples, aliquots, transferring them to other labs, making sure of quality control, pulling the results, doing QBEs [query by examples], which is just pulling all the data from the system--so it's a very complex system, which can obviously have a lot go wrong at any given point, and so an ELIMS super-user kind of understands how to perform all of those tasks and can guide other people 00:25:00in how to perform everything. They also know who to contact when everything doesn't go right.

Q: Okay. Explain to me what "aliquot" is?

HARTLOGE: An aliquot is kind of taking a larger sample and making a smaller tube of it. It's just taken straight from that.

Q: Oh, so they're like mini samples from the larger sample.

HARTLOGE: Yes. It's the same material. A sub-sample is we've--

Q: A fancy name for it.

HARTLOGE: Exactly. Lots of fancy names here. A sub-sample is the RNA that we pulled from the sample. It's been manipulated in some way.

Q: Okay, gotcha. How many samples, at your height, do you think you were getting in, besides that eight hundred one? This is during the whole COVID--like, February, March, April (2020).

HARTLOGE: When I first began, we were getting about maybe fifty samples a week? 00:26:00It wasn't a big influx. It ramped up depending on different studies that were going on, dropped back down if not a lot of studies were going on, and then fall of 2020 it kind of ramped up and never stopped. At the very end of 2020--2021? It's all confusing, all these years now.

Q: End of 2020 would have been, we're just about starting to vaccinate people.

HARTLOGE: That's when we were also doing--a lot of the variants started coming through. With the variants came out new studies, and one of those studies is continuously ongoing--it's a surveillance study. Now they're receiving anywhere between 1,000 to 1,500 samples a week.

Q: Has the lab staff increased? Or do you guys, like--each lab takes their turn 00:27:00at doing COVID work?

HARTLOGE: The TRL or now COORS [Core Operations, Outbreak Response, and Support] lab, the amount of people down there fluctuates based off of who's on the response, if their home lab needs them back, you know, things like that.

Q: That COORS thing is a deployed--?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Okay, so everybody is picked from other teams and they're deployed to the COORS lab.

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: Okay.

HARTLOGE: It's now getting--once it turned into COORS, it became part of a more stabilized lab, so now they have people that are actually employed just for that lab. But before it became COORS, it was just a response laboratory. It was brought up in like seven days, so. Q: Sure.

HARTLOGE: Making do with what we had. Now it's turning into a lab of its own because it's still very much needed.

Q: Okay. Sort of like how we never had an AIDS [Acquired Immune Deficiency 00:28:00Syndrome] lab, and then suddenly we had this HIV [Human Immunodeficiency Virus]/AIDS lab, and now it's an entire center.

HARTLOGE: Exactly.

Q: Yes, we kind of grow with diseases. What was my question, darn it? Oh yes. Early on, CDC was taking in samples, and we had testing, and these test kits that went out--I don't know if you can speak to this, but some of them were faulty, and there was a big--well, CDC took a hit for that. Can you speak about that a little bit? Not--you don't have to point fingers or name names, I'm not asking that, but we're meant to be gold-standard and we kind of took a hit.

HARTLOGE: That all happened before I went down to TRL. I just got to hear about it all, but I didn't actually--I wasn't involved with it or anything like that. It was just kind of hearing the backlash from it afterwards.

Q: Was there a lot of backlash, or did everybody get disappointed, or--?

HARTLOGE: It kind of made it where instead of being a lab space where we perform everything, we know what are quality indicators and stuff--being a response lab, you have people staring down at the lab constantly anyway, because they want results. "We need results now" type of thing. After, I believe, that seems like there was a lot more eyes on the lab. It wasn't just TRL or--I don't even think it was TRL involved at all. It was just COVID labs overall, the whole overarching. There were a lot of labs that are involved that were doing COVID response. There was, like, at least five, ten different lab spaces. It just had a lot more attention on it after that, and a lot more, I guess, quality checking and things like that.

Q: Did you feel the pressure of that constantly, or was it--?

HARTLOGE: I came from a CLIA laboratory--rabies was a CLIA laboratory, so I'm kind of used to that kind of pressure. QMS [quality management system] and all of those types of quality things are--especially when it comes to CLIA, is very "You need to follow by the books; everything gets documented." If you come from a CLIA lab, you're very used to that. If you come from a research-based lab, you're not as used to it.

Q: Oh, interesting.

HARTLOGE: It's a little bit of a shock sometimes.

Q: I thought we were all CLIA. But that makes sense. I mean, when you're in a research lab, you're trying to figure things out, and you may have to do things differently. Okay. Now. You're doing studies, you're taking on more roles--you've got another role coming up, the post-analytical--

HARTLOGE: Study coordinator.

Q: Oh, boy.

HARTLOGE: Oh. Yes.

Q: Does that have an acronym?

HARTLOGE: No, it doesn't. But that role involved looking at all the ongoing 00:31:00studies--you know, anywhere from ten to twenty-five ongoing studies, some of them more complex than others. Seeing what labs were requested for samples to go to--if it's just for PCR, which involved two separate labs, or if it's for whole-genome sequencing, which involved a whole another lab, or culturing, which is another--so it kind of is looking at what was needed and requested for information and results, and making sure that there's enough sample, even, to go to all these labs. If there's not enough sample then there's like a hierarchy of what's more important. You have to be in charge of, okay, well, I only have this much, I can only go to two different labs--I need to figure out and relay that information.

Q: Okay. How much is enough for a sample? I mean, if we're talking about the 00:32:00swabs that went up your nose and then swirled around inside some sort of liquid--what was that liquid?

HARTLOGE: Media.

Q: Media. Okay, so that was just in there to keep it in stasis?

HARTLOGE: Kind of, yes. We'd take from that VTM [viral transport media] media or saline, you know, things like that--take from that to run our test. Most times we had one to two mLs [milliliters] when samples were received.

Q: That's not much.

HARTLOGE: It doesn't sound like much, but for running a lot of these tests, that's plenty. The samples that came in with, you know, five hundred microliters, we could do only a few things with. It kind of depends on what the sample quality was like when it came in and what the study was needing. Some studies only needed a PCR, and it only required a little bit amount, and then some studies required a lot more.

Q: Were you doing international study, or testing--any international samples 00:33:00come in, or any international studies?

HARTLOGE: Not that I recall off the top of my head. I know that we did a lot of studies--there were studies involving, like, cruise ships or military ships, carrier-type ships. But I can't recall any actual international--

Q: Did you partner with NIH [National Institutes of Health] on a lot of this stuff?

HARTLOGE: I wouldn't know.

Q: All right.

HARTLOGE: That was all over my head.

Q: You are really the study flow--so you take your samples in and you dispense it to whoever in a hierarchy thing, depending on how much media you have.

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: All right. Where do these samples go when you're done with them, and if there's anything left of them?

HARTLOGE: We have a curator-custodian person for all of our archiving samples. 00:34:00Whatever is left, if there is anything left, even a blank tube, we'll put it in the freezer; at least maybe you can get something out of it at some point if we ever want to go back to it. But those are all maintained by a now-custodian who looks and keeps all of the COVID samples. I think all of the COVID samples that have been received by CDC are within, you know, five or so freezers--giant freezers, but--

Q: Those are those--they look like giant--they're big, round, they're like six feet across, six feet tall, and they open at the top and then this big puff cloud comes out and you pull out this rack?

HARTLOGE: We don't have any of the chest freezers. We have the upright freezers that are about three foot across, maybe like seven foot tall, because it has to have so much extra room to cool it. A lot of them have about five shelves in 00:35:00them that are all frozen solid, but we put racks in them and put boxes in the racks, or plates in the racks, and it just kind of--

Q: We do have an archive of samples of these things, from the very beginning to even now, and keep that. Each one has their own specific accession number?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Meaning that number for that tube, and that correlates to some sort of document that is in--?

HARTLOGE: ELIMS.

Q: ELIMS, thank you.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Great. Do those stay on campus, or do they go to the great archive in Lawrenceville?

HARTLOGE: Right now we have everything on campus.

Q: Okay. That's a lot of room, or space.

HARTLOGE: It's a lot of freezers.

Q: It's a lot of freezers. Did they have to get more space? Did they have to clear out some stuff that's been sitting around too long? "Get that sample out of here, we need the space?"

HARTLOGE: There's definitely purchasing of bigger freezers, moving some of the smaller freezers that, you know, took up a large space, and changing it out with a larger freezer that took up the actual space that it was in. Finding space 00:36:00within corridors or different labs, depending on who's on the response.

Q: The response has kind of changed over time. First we were responding and making do with what we had, and now we have created an entire group that specializes completely in COVID samples, or--

HARTLOGE: Kind of.

Q: Because that's what COORS is. It's a COVID map--

HARTLOGE: COORS is the beginning of where it can go. For PCR, in the beginning and even now, there was two labs involved. They interchanged, one week on, one week off, to handle the amount of sample loads and things. Then cultural labs were involved and whole-genome sequencing labs. Now it can involve a whole group of people.

Q: It has a whole palette of labs it can choose from?

HARTLOGE: Yes, pretty much.

Q: Okay, so you keep saying--what is it? The genome sequencing--?

HARTLOGE: Whole-genome sequencing?

Q: Yes. Can you explain a little bit more about that? It's not like PCR, it's totally different--

HARTLOGE: It's not like PCR, but it's taking the results or the sample from PCR and finding more about the genetic structure of it, and being able to tell, okay, this looks like this, and this is this variant. I can't explain the whole process because I have not been involved in whole-genome sequencing, but it is a whole new beast. It's something that wasn't--I guess there's much tension on, I guess, pre-COVID, or it was just kind of starting up in a lot of different labs, and now it is a giant thing that all samples for a particular study are going whole-genome sequencing.

Q: Is it because we want to look for variants, or how it's changing and manipulating itself?

HARTLOGE: Yes, this is--

Q: --better way of saying that.

HARTLOGE: Yes, this is checking for variants. They can tell that right now, you know, all the samples coming in are primarily Omicron variant. They can see if there's any other variants that are becoming of interest. They check all of the data that goes into the CDC website that show, you know, we have primarily Delta going on right now, or the whatever variant is ongoing. IT can show exactly the percentages, the--what we call the NS3 study. It's the National Surveillance Sequencing Study. That takes in samples from all the state public health labs that are all positive, and those just go straight for sequencing, and so we can kind of tell where we're at nationally.

Q: Variant-wise.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Oh, okay, great. Oh, that's good. Do all the state health departments follow 00:39:00that plan and make sure they get their samples to CDC?

HARTLOGE: As far as I'm aware.

Q: Okay. Because what happens is, they bring in--the state and local health departments all kind of bubble up from the local to the state, and then state sends it to CDC--

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: --where you assemble all that data together.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Okay. That has been pretty seamless during this response?

HARTLOGE: Absolutely not.

Q: Okay.

HARTLOGE: There was a lack of infrastructure, and some labs didn't have the technology built up on how to transfer the results to CDC or how to build up--a lot of the island-type labs sometimes don't send samples to CDC very often. Just getting into the knowledge of how to do that--so it took a lot of work at the 00:40:00beginning. But now, I think, technology has grown a lot in the last two years, and so the infrastructure with it has grown.

Q: This whole pandemic has really shone a light on the infrastructure and how some of them weren't really up to speed. Now we have that infrastructure a little bit more up to speed, if people can do these--can respond faster. At the very beginning the response was a little scattershot, you might say?

HARTLOGE: Yes, a little bit.

Q: That makes sense because Alaska is not the same as Atlanta.

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: I'm sure there was funding involved in that too.

HARTLOGE: I'm sure.

Q: Yes, everybody has--and what we don't always realize is that each state has their own rights to their health and their health laboratories, so they're not 00:41:00beholden--they keep their health data the way they keep their health data. Georgia has a different way of keeping their data as opposed to Alaska and how they keep it. That was kind of difficult to navigate around each individual state's way of how they report.

HARTLOGE: Yes. At CDC we have the ELIMS system, but other states may have other sample management systems ongoing. Some larger states, you know, New York, California, Florida-type places, might have a robust system of knowing how samples are received, and are used to sending samples to CDC and some smaller states that don't have a robust system in place kind of had to get up to speed, or figure out how to do with all this.

Q: Right. There was some health disparity when we were talking about other 00:42:00communities like the Native American population--so getting those samples out of their nations, that was a difficult one, and also--

HARTLOGE: That was a very difficult one. There was a couple of studies that involved working with the Native American communities, and the stories that came out of how to even get samples to CDC involved driving, you know, three hours to. When you're talking about long distances and traveling of a sample, you have to make sure that sample quality also goes with it. Making sure a sample's frozen the entire time, or on ice packs. It's definitely a change for some people.

Q: Yes, so how do samples usually get shipped to CDC? Do they just go FedEx?

HARTLOGE: Yes. FedEx, UPS [United Parcel Service], it kind of depends what the need is and what that state public health lab or lab will work with, or has a 00:43:00contract with. They get shipped on dry ice if they're frozen or get shipped on ice packs if they're cold. When they get to CDC, STAT Lab checks to make sure that the ice packs are still frozen and the sample's still cold or that there's still dry ice in the box and that samples haven't thawed--so that sample integrity is still there.

Q: Do you guys send out shipping packs, or does each state have to come up with their own shipping packs?

HARTLOGE: Depends the need. Some studies require some shipping packs to be sent out; other states have that kind of infrastructure already in place.

Q: Oh, wow. Okay, so that was a problem when you were dealing with Native American groups--they didn't have proper shipping, or was it just because their communities are so spread out and rural?

HARTLOGE: It was more because they were more spread out in rural areas that it requires a little bit of figuring out how to get the sample to a more populated area to actually ship it.

Q: Okay. Logistics. Okay. Great. Now, where are we in time? Mm, where are we? Looking at samples. We did that. Oh, strain surveillance, we had talked about that. You were working on that from February to March.

HARTLOGE: Yes. In early 2021, the strain surveillance and emerging variants team--it primarily involved three studies, which were emerging variants, vaccine breakthroughs, and the national surveillance--SARS-COVID-2 [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2] strain surveillance sequencing team or study.

Q: You were making sure everybody had what they needed in the field as well. When we were talking about those--

HARTLOGE: This didn't involve making sure everyone in the field had what they needed. This more involved making sure that things were coming into CDC with the appropriate paperwork and that--

Q: --so sorry, my stomach just growled. Hope that didn't pick up.

HARTLOGE: --Making sure that samples that were potential vaccine breakthroughs were being--did that one pick up?

Q: It sure did, sorry. It must be so many samples breakthrough.

HARTLOGE: Yes, for the vaccine breakthroughs, it was making sure that those samples got routed to the right labs, seeing if it was a true breakthrough--there was a definition that went through with what that meant, making sure that that definition was actually matched with the sample, so things like that.

Q: Yes, because this is February/March, and most people started getting theirs around April--like, not everyone, but the older population got theirs December up to--whatever that was. March/April is when the regular population started getting their vaccines.

HARTLOGE: Yes, they had the vaccine rollouts, and more and more people were getting vaccinated, but at that time we weren't seeing a lot of breakthrough cases. If you were vaccinated, you were pretty great. Which is very different from what we've seen in late 2021 and early 2022.

Q: What's that, then?

HARTLOGE: Now there's a higher rate of vaccine breakthroughs with certain variants.

Q: Oh, really?

HARTLOGE: One big concern later in time was the Delta breaking through the vaccine barrier that people have and still infecting people and realizing that even vaccinated people can spread the virus was a big thing. Very fluid environment, and just kind of figuring it out as you go.

Q: Did you spend a lot of time with--well, working in any kind of vaccine study?

HARTLOGE: This was just primarily--the vaccine breakthrough was just kind of the beginning of when we were seeing those breakthroughs happen. I was out of the response before it actually ramped up to what it is now.

Q: Okay. That California household and the Colorado household variant study--were you worked on those?

HARTLOGE: After the strain surveillance and emerging variants team, I moved over to the epi field studies logistics team--

Q: That would be in March 2021?

HARTLOGE: March to April of 2021, yes. At the time, what that entailed was making sure logistically the study teams out in California and Colorado had what they needed. There was the Household Variant Transmission Study, which was based in San Diego and Denver at the time. That went to different households, looked at--took environmental sampling swabs, sampled from all the individuals within 00:48:00that household, things like that, to kind of see how COVID was reacting within the house.

Q: Interesting. I didn't know that study was out there. What happened with that study? Do you know any results, or is it still ongoing?

HARTLOGE: It's not ongoing anymore, from what I know. I don't know what the results are, because they got send to CDC and I was off the response at that point. But I know that team had a lot of different studies--they had to figure out the logistics of different studies, so different studies require--you know, same as it was in the lab, different studies require different things. But from that standpoint it was on the logistics-base side, so making sure they had in the field what they needed.

Q: Okay, so you were supporting them with gloves and--?

HARTLOGE: Gloves, mask, phlebotomy kits--

Q: Phlebotomy kits meaning blood drawing?

HARTLOGE: Yes. Making sure they had the tubes and needles of certain sizes, if they were doing blood draws from kids or adults. Even having just simple office 00:49:00supplies, clipboards and things like that, for surveys if they were doing that. Anything you could think of that you could possibly need in the field-- it was being run through that lab. Or run to that team.

Q: Is it hard to find that kind of stuff, then, in April of 2021?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Really.

HARTLOGE: Some supplies were a little easier to come by. Thankfully CDC has that name carried with it, so when you order things, you tend to be top in line to get items, at least. But there--at that time we were running into a lot of supply-chain issues, which we're still kind of experiencing. When a company is out of, for instance, CaviWipes, which were used to disinfect--we had them around the CDC, even, but CaviWipes are a great disinfectant-wipe type of thing. There are multiple companies that were just out of those for the longest time, 00:50:00and were backordered, and there was no end in sight to where that backorder would end. So I think I ended up going on Amazon and finding them through there instead. That team required the most versatility. You had--one company was out of a supply, you could try and find it at the other company, if that company's out of it try another one, if you can't find it anywhere, do we have it on-campus at CDC? Can another lab here release those materials and not need them right now, since a lot of our labs were kind of working at half capacity? Can we transfer those samples--you know, those supplies to a field team that needs them right then and there?

Q: That's a lot of logistics, and really kind of being nimble and knowing what's available on campus and knowing what you can and cannot--yes. Wow. That's good.

HARTLOGE: Lot of communication with people.

Q: Yes, you spent your day emailing a lot of people and calling?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Wow, all right. A little bit different than being in the lab.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: This was more, once again, almost an air traffic controller-type situation, only even more air traffic controlling. All right, so after that, we have this--we talked about a national surveillance strain--?

HARTLOGE: Yes, National SARS Strain Surveillance. That's the NS3 study. That's kind of ongoing. That one has been probably the longest-running study that the lab's been getting samples from. That's where all the state health labs are sending the positive samples for whole-genome sequencing.

Q: Okay, so that is called the National Surveillance--okay, that's the NS3. Now it's all making sense. There's one ongoing study, surveillance study, that's been going on since February? Maybe January of 2020?

HARTLOGE: That started the end of 2020, I believe.

Q: Okay, all right. Wow. That's a long time. It'll keep going, right?

HARTLOGE: Yes. I'm pretty sure that's one of the studies that will probably keep going for a while.

Q: That ends your time with COVID, and you return to your home lab?

HARTLOGE: I return to the rabies lab for a little while; at that time, they were--more people were being allowed on campus to some degree, and because it was a CLIA lab, I was able to return to campus and help with some of the CLIA activities, and then eventually ended up where I am.

Q: Returning to--I mean, the rabies lab still had to perform a lot of its duties, and probably had to take on more role because the other labs were so involved with COVID. What was my question? These labs still had to continue to do their work. Was there a lot of backlog to your rabies lab when you returned to it?

HARTLOGE: There wasn't that much of a backlog; the other people that are in the 00:53:00lab that were all the essential personnel were still there, so all I had left to go to the response--other people were still there doing the work that was required. It may have taken a little bit longer, because they weren't--they had to handle the sample accessioning, which is something I primarily did, and handle the sample management side of it, and then also go test the sample. It maybe took a little longer, but they were pretty robust in keeping everything up and running.

Q: Okay. Because everybody got picked--I mean, what--you had all these labs, and then people were picked to respond to COVID, and those labs still had to keep doing their work, and then they were missing some integral people. But then you returned. But now you're not on the response at all.

HARTLOGE: Now I'm currently not on the response at all. I would go back to the response in a heartbeat if I ever got to that point where I could. The response work was some of the best work that I've experienced at CDC.

Q: Why is that?

HARTLOGE: It's the people and the atmosphere of it. Some of the people that volunteer for response work are some of the most versatile, think-on-your-toes, outgoing, encouraging people I have ever met.

Q: Really.

HARTLOGE: It's just a different type of personality. Those people are happy to be there. They're happy to help in any way, and so having an entire team full of people that are go-getters and ready to do this is just wonderful.

Q: A lot of energy, a lot of endorphins going around, since you're working really long hours?

HARTLOGE: Exactly.

Q: That was helpful? But that also--does that mean, do you have a little bit of burnout on that after a while?

HARTLOGE: I think CDC dealt with a lot of burnout altogether with people working on the response. For a while, because they were relying so heavily on the FTEs and being on the response is kind of an adrenaline rush, but eventually that 00:55:00adrenaline runs--(crosstalk). Yes, there was definitely a lot of worry about burnout and making sure that people that were in the lab, especially the ones working long hours, were taking those holiday breaks or taking that time away from--and going back to their family and trying to spend time away from the lab space as well.

Q: Right. The mental health portion of this was very large. Also another thing that kind of came out of COVID with mental health is--because people were isolated; we all were working in a space at one time together, and then we all went home to each and became kind of isolated. You know, there's a lot of people who don't have family that they were living with, so they're even further isolated. That mental health part is such a big part of continuing working. Even though you do have the adrenaline rush, you still have that feeling of isolation; you didn't experience that because you were living with your husband?

HARTLOGE: I didn't experience some of it.

Q: Let's turn towards that. I think we've covered most of the other COVID response that we did--is there something else you wanted to share in your COVID response time?

HARTLOGE: No, I think that was all of it.

Q: Excellent. When you--let's just go to your household and family and the personal side to all of this, because COVID--there's no separation now from work life and home life. It all became one big stream at some point in time. How did it affect the people you knew? I mean, first of all, how did you first hear about COVID?

HARTLOGE: COVID was something that we heard little whispers about in early 2020. It was more of a problem in other countries, but it hadn't been confirmed here. 00:57:00Those first reports of it being confirmed here, it was like, okay, is this just something that's just isolated? Is this isolated incidences? There wasn't a community transmission type of atmosphere yet. I went to a soccer match up in Nashville, Tennessee; following that, I went to a concert that same weekend, and the following week I ended up with flu. I was home sick for that entire week with flu, and the following week nobody was at work, because we were all sent home. That week that I was out with flu, there were a lot of emails--you know, thankfully I had my computer at home, for my work computer at home, but there were a lot of emails of preparing everyone for shutting down, and what that might entail. There was no known date on when the shutdown would end. I don't think a lot of people expected it to be all the way until 2022.

Q: Two years, yes.

HARTLOGE: There was a lot of--it went from whispers to being, okay, now we're all preparing for this whole shutdown atmosphere; I can't imagine what it was like for IT [information technology] people, trying to prepare for that.

Q: Exactly. I mean, it was a very fast turnaround. As you said, it went from whispers to all of a sudden, we are in lockdown. That happened very quickly. I don't think a lot of people were prepared. Like, you had at least a laptop, and then the IT people must have just gone "Holy cats," an entire workload--trying to log onto, remotely, to CDC's main brain.

HARTLOGE: Yes, it was about two, three weeks that it went from whispers to everything's locked down. A lot of people were--the ones that didn't have laptops connected to docking stations were trying to get laptops, and so 00:59:00thankfully I could just bring my laptop home with a cord and at least set up some sort of makeshift office. Yes.

Q: Right. Then plugging into--because laboratory people also have certain software that they need to--like the ELIMS system, has to be remote--remotified. I don't think that's a word. But to log into that, you had to go through a certain--I think it was called Citrix at the time.

HARTLOGE: Yes. Logging into the CDC's database through remote access, and when you have hundreds of people doing that at once it kind of can slow down. I noticed the speed of working on ELIMS when I was at home was an extra two, three minutes for every click.

Q: There was a lag time, yes.

HARTLOGE: There was quite a large lag time. Now if I work to work from home and 01:00:00work on the ELIMS, it's gotten a lot better, but there's still a lag time because they're trying to go through a different system.

Q: Yes, and then keeping that all safe security-wise, for the IT part, I think they did a great job in very little time. Kudos to them.

HARTLOGE: Definitely.

Q: You were sick--you didn't really have a chance to, "Oh, I've got to pack up my office and leave." You didn't get to come back.

HARTLOGE: I had about one day--half a day, one day--but came to work, I believe, on that Friday. I was sick primarily Monday through Thursday, felt a lot better by Friday, and was on the mend and on meds by that point. I came to campus for the full day, half a day, to get everything in order, and then we shut down.

Q: Yes. It was pretty quick. I didn't actually get to leave, so--well, I did leave, but then I could come back. You started to come back too.

HARTLOGE: I was at home for quite a bit with the rabies, came back--obviously once I was on the response I had to be on campus, because that was the laboratory space. Then afterwards I was allowed to come on campus as needed for CLIA work.

Q: Just for the history books, let's recall what it was like to come back on campus, and what you had to go through in the very beginning.

HARTLOGE: Living in Atlanta when you're--Atlanta's notorious for its traffic. The months following the initial shutdown were some of the best traffic days ever. That was like the one major highlight that came out of COVID and this unfortunate circumstance, was nobody was on the roads. It was great. My 01:02:00thirty-minute commute was actually a thirty-minute commute, not forty-five, an hour. But coming onto campus required doing the screening, and at the time it was temperature checks at the door. They would give you a sticker saying that you'd been checked that day, and you got a different sticker each day that correlated different colors, and all of us that were working on campus had quite a lot of fun collecting all the stickers. That eventually got digitized to not needing to do a temperature check, and now it's just a screening, and now it's a screening on an as-needed basis. It just kind of--

Q: Now it's just something like--almost an app where you just answer the questions and you get a colored screen that says you're good to go on campus.

HARTLOGE: Yes. I miss the stickers. They were a lot of fun.

Q: The Visitors' Center, we had this automated full-body scanner that checked 01:03:00your temperature. It was pretty amazing. You'd walk in, you'd stand on the spot, the whole thing would scan you, and if your temperature was within range, you got your sticker and went on. That only lasted a week, because it was like, oh my God. This is like--

HARTLOGE: That sounds cool.

Q: --it felt like another Space-Age thing. But it didn't last long.

HARTLOGE: Ours was just the little no-touch digital thermometer type things.

Q: That's what it turned into too. Next week it was just a lady with digital thermometer.

HARTLOGE: Yes. Somebody was responsible for sitting at the desk at the front of each building, taking temps of people and handing them stickers.

Q: Yes. They ask the questions, like, "Have you been out of the country?" "Have you--" you know. We'll put those down later, all the questions. But you had a mom that was overseas because she's in--

HARTLOGE: She's currently in Japan. She's a civilian now, but she's retired military, and so she's working on the base near Tokyo.

Q: That was far apart, and actually Japan had that cruise ship that came in, and--

HARTLOGE: Yes, Japan has handled this a very different way than the US has handled COVID. One aspect--they were handling the cruise ship, and when all that was going on, it was talking with her via online Facebook Messenger or Skype type thing. Seeing what it meant for her, and so comparing experiences that were ongoing with her versus what I was experiencing here was just kind of all neat, but--

Q: Were you worried about her?

HARTLOGE: She's in the high-risk category, so very, very worried about whether or not she would get COVID, especially before the vaccines started rolling out. Probably where some of that anxiety came from eventually with mental health. But since she was high-risk, it was making sure that she was following protocol. Thankfully she was in Japan, and a lot of them masked without any problems--so 01:05:00that's just part of their culture, that they mask when they don't feel well.

Q: They mask when they don't feel well because they don't want to affect other people, and that is a courtesy towards other people, to wear a mask.

HARTLOGE: Yes. That's just in their culture to do that, yes.

Q: It's a common courtesy. "Excuse me, I have a cold."

HARTLOGE: Exactly.

Q: I love that.

HARTLOGE: Yes. She's one of the main safety officers there, kind of runs one of the safety type of branches, teams.

Q: For CDC?

HARTLOGE: No, for the DoD, Department of Defense, for the base that she's on. But part of that also involved her also being on response, to some degree, but over there. They had their own response team for any COVID cases to monitor the COVID cases on base, monitor the transmission, you know, kind of seeing how the 01:06:00base compares to out in town, making sure that people go through what they call ROM [restriction of movement]--going through a quarantine period when they arrive, which can go anywhere from three days to two weeks. She was kind of responsible for being in the know-how of all those mechanisms.

Q: Did she call you at all and ask you questions about that, or did she just get it from her DoD people?

HARTLOGE: We talked most mornings, but it's more just a chit-chat than it is an asking certain things. Just more of an experience with chit-chat.

Q: Have you seen her at all, other than--have you gone to visit her?

HARTLOGE: She's flown back once, and that was a great, like, three weeks. She had to go through a two-week quarantine when she got back, but--

Q: Oh, is it still in the two-week quarantine now?

HARTLOGE: They dropped down to a three-day quarantine for all of, like, a week. 01:07:00Then cases were rising and they went back up to a two-week quarantine. I have not been able to fly out. But every time we've been stationed--or my mom's been stationed at different places, Bahrain, Italy, or wherever, I've always either been there or traveled there and been able to go there and visit. I haven't been able to visit yet in Japan, although I'd love to go see all the cherry blossoms that are all blooming right now.

Q: Ooh, yes, right now, yes.

HARTLOGE: My plans for traveling out there have been postponed each year and each year, and so we'll try again next year and see if we can, but.

Q: We had a conversation about your husband, who--his job was deemed essential.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: You want to talk about that?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Then also his routine coming home--I loved that.

HARTLOGE: My husband had a very essential job. His name is Bradley, and he is a wine salesman. At the very beginning of the pandemic, obviously a lot of CDC 01:08:00professionals and healthcare workers were all deemed essential, as were store clerks and things that--working at the grocery store. That also looped in my husband; being a wine salesman, he was deemed essential, because people needed some liquid courage during this time. He was deemed essential, and everything that entailed. He at one point had a badge that he could show people, or a pass that he could show people that he could show--if he ever got stopped on the road, like, "Why are you out and about and away from home?" He had something to show for it.

Q: Did he ever get stopped?

HARTLOGE: No. But apparently, they were stopping people at one point.

Q: Yes, I got stopped. When he came home from being--I mean, he would go out, and he was delivering wine, or just selling it?

HARTLOGE: He's just selling it, helping set up displays and things like that. 01:09:00But because he's in and out of ten-plus stores a day, liquor stores, grocery stores, wherever it may be, that is a lot of people that he could come into contact within a lot of environments. He has a pretty giant bottle of sanitizer in his car, and so obviously in addition to the masking, it was sanitizing before and after each store, trying to keep the bottle of sanitizer, which was hard to find sometimes, keeping that kind of stocked. When he got home, it was making sure he washes his hands when he comes in, and we kind of just, like, leave our shoes in the garage. You know, just decon [decontamination] as much as you can, when we weren't really sure what was going on with the pandemic.

Q: Yes. It was very interesting to see how people would return after working. I would take my shoes off before-- I didn't go anywhere but here and home, but I 01:10:00would come to work and sanitize my space, because I didn't know who was touching it.

HARTLOGE: Yes. I was more worried about him coming into contact with COVID potentially than I was with me coming to campus. Even though I was working with COVID samples, we had a lot of protocols and BSC environments and things like that. I was a little less worried, where he was just out and about interacting with a lot of people, potentially, and going store to store to store.

Q: Did you worry about him?

HARTLOGE: All the time. He's also Mr. Social--he's such a sociable person, and so when he's in and out of stores he can talk with people for over the quote-unquote "ten, fifteen minutes--"

Q: Fifteen minutes?

HARTLOGE: --yes, ten, fifteen minutes that we were kind of gauging exposures with. His whole job was talking with people and being around people. Being Mr. Sociable, he enjoys things like that. But what I found funny was that he--the 01:11:00pandemic hit him, and the whole shutdown and everything hit him a lot harder than it did somebody that's more introverted like myself, because I'm okay being a homebody and going home, work, home, work, whereas he's like, "Well, I want to go out and see friends and see people." He needs that social interaction a lot more, even though he's getting the social interaction with work. But that was not the same social interaction he was needing.

Q: Yes, so you guys stopped seeing friends, but how did you maintain friendships and--?

HARTLOGE: We stopped seeing a lot of our friends, especially in the lockdown early on, and we tried to do the Zoom hangout sessions with our friends. We played a video game over Zoom with--in the background and stuff that you could do at distance, and different things like that. Hanging out and just having a 01:12:00glass of wine on chat and chatting with our friends. Later on, we could finally meet up, but meeting up outdoors, sitting at a distance, anything like that.

Q: Yes. It was interesting early on, how to communicate with your friends and family.

HARTLOGE: Early on, I ended up--I guess, to get my social interaction, the little bit I would like beyond just eventually joining the response, was talking with the travel communities. Being a military rat, I'm an avid traveler, and so I ended up joining the "travel from home" initiative that they termed it. But it's a travel community opened up by a company called Trip Scout that--we just sat there telling each other travel stories, or, you know, talking about food from different places. Encouraging people to try making food from different 01:13:00places. Now I'm a lot more hungry. But--and I got to show off--everyone took on their own projects.

Q: Yes, there was a lot of bread being made.

HARTLOGE: Yes, lot of different experimentations of food and, you know, home improvements type thing. I ended up creating and making my own shadow boxes at the time and got to show those off to my travel friends that I ended up making. We had, like, a travel roulette where we would match with a different person in our group each week, and we would just say, "Hey," arrange to meet with that person sometime over Zoom this week and got to talk with people that were in different parts of the US, got to talk to people that were in Serbia and Colombia and all over the world. But we just got to chitchat, and kind of catch up. I ended up growing my network of people, because of technology in 01:14:00early-shutdown COVID.

Q: Yes. It's been enlightening to see people, but I want to meet them in person now. But you're not a--I can't go to Serbia, any more than they can come here. But yes.

HARTLOGE: It's added a lot of travel destinations to my list. Now I have friends in each of those countries that I have to go visit eventually.

Q: Yes, it kind of made the world smaller, but also more isolated sometimes. Did you have any trouble falling asleep or--?

HARTLOGE: Not too much. I'm a sleep person. I thoroughly enjoy my sleep.

Q: Did you go out into the woods or anything--like, not see people, but try to get outside? Because this summer--

HARTLOGE: Yes, I tried to whenever you could. I drive a convertible, so putting the top down on the car and having the fresh air in my face, very great for 01:15:00mental health. Just being outside, trying to go on hikes different places. Georgia has a lot of great places to hike and waterfalls to see and things, so.

Q: Did you worry when you saw people on the path, like, "Oh, I can't breathe in near them?"

HARTLOGE: It was more like stepping to the side, kind of allowing people to have that kind of room to walk around. One of our places that we like hiking involved a lot of steps and narrow paths, so stepping to the side to allow somebody to come up or go down if you're on the pathway as well, or things like that. But it wasn't--I think for a while some national parks were quite packed because people were trying to get outside and do something.

Q: Yes, they were very packed, and it just--seeing people so close after being in lockdown for so long was so strange. It was nice but also you have this kind of "stay away from me" feeling, which kind of made me feel--

HARTLOGE: You had your bubble--you had the bubble that you were in. You just wanted to stay in your bubble and move around and stuff.

Q: Right. The first time I went grocery shopping was amazing to me but also really scary.

HARTLOGE: I remember some of the first times grocery shopping as bringing things home and then wiping everything down when you get home. Not knowing, okay, well, did the fact that somebody else touched this before I touched this--is that a worry? All these fruits and vegetables, let me wash them off. It's a very--

Q: Yes, there were rituals that happened that--we don't have those anymore, now that we are all vac--well, once you're vaccinated you felt like you had this coat of armor, you could go out and go, "I've been vaccinated." Then we found out that people who were vaccinated--

HARTLOGE: Were still getting it.

Q: Still getting it, and you're like, oh, okay, not so much.

HARTLOGE: We put the mask back on, and still sanitize. I still keep my little bottle of sanitizer and sanitize before and after. I still haven't really gone 01:17:00in many restaurants to eat inside a restaurant; I'm still not up to that. But it's--you know, depending on--now it's kind of depending on people's comfort zones with things, and going based off of what you are kind of comfortable with.

Q: Did you know anybody who got sick with COVID? Do you think you got sick with COVID?

HARTLOGE: I don't believe I've ever had COVID. As far as I can tell, none of our immediate family has also never been sick. My mother-in-law is also high-risk, so being careful with her is a concern. But most of our immediate family has thankfully not--as far as I'm aware, at least, that anyone's told me. They may also be not telling me because I do work at CDC. But none of them have been sick. I've had a lot of friends that have had COVID and gotten sick, some of which have gotten so sick that they contemplated going to the hospital, or some 01:18:00of which did go to the hospital. Then I've also had friends and even friends here that have lost family members. It's hitting people in very different ways, and the severity is just all over the place.

Q: Do you think you know your friends differently, like, the ones who did get vaccines, and there's that kind of whole social hierarchy now, who's vaccinated, who's not?

HARTLOGE: There is definitely that--we had a couple friends of ours that we loved dearly and loved seeing them, and they are vaccinated, so I'm a little bit more open with seeing them, but I also know that they have a large family that they hang out with on a very normal basis, and when thinking about it, the person that you interact with has their own social circle who then--each of those people have their own social circle. When you're interacting with one person, you're really interacting with everybody else. It's considering that. 01:19:00For the longest time we kind of hung out with them at very large distances, because I knew that their social circle had a lot more people than my social circle did. It's just being wary of how many people possibly you're interacting with.

Q: Yes. I think there's a lot of skepticism in your community, and there's also getting to know people who decided not to get the vaccine and their reasons. I think there's been a lot of--CDC's reputation has been covered differently in the media depending on the media and the public perception of CDC. We're just trying to do what we always do and get that work done, but in the middle of this pandemic, CDC experienced leadership change at the federal level and at the 01:20:00agency level. Did any of those types of changes affect how you worked or your job?

HARTLOGE: In the lab, in the day-to-day, no. Us laboratorians come in, do what we need to do, and get the results we need and go from there. The ins and outs of the lab, no. The main experience that--or main thing that I saw when we did have the leadership change was Dr. [Rochelle] Walensky is on an initiative to go around and thank everyone that has been working on the response and came down to one of the COVID laboratories--went around to, I believe, most of the COVID laboratories, and is just going around understanding what's being done in the lab from the laboratorians' aspect.

Q: That's cool.

HARTLOGE: Obviously thanking us for all of the hard work that everyone has been putting in. It's just a great appreciation to see everything, all of the efforts 01:21:00that we do on a day-to-day basis, were appreciated from such a high level.

Q: Yes, that's good. Did you think that the media covered the CDC well, or do you think our--because it's an emerging virus and our guidance changed a bit because of the emerging virus,--what are your thoughts on how the media covered us?

HARTLOGE: I think there was a lot of wanting all the information as it was happening. As--

Q: Because we're so connected.

HARTLOGE: --we want this result now. We want to be able to figure out what's being done now, and we want the results of the sample I just sent off two seconds ago, three seconds later. While in one aspect it's great to have that transparency of "this is all the data that's being generated and pushed out and this is why our protocols and guidelines and stuff are all changing," it also 01:22:00comes with like a grain of salt that I don't think the public really understands heavily, that this is still a scientific process. We are still learning as we go. I think it's hard for people that aren't in the science industries to understand that guidelines will change, because new data is emerging and new data's coming out. There's a lot of skepticism being thrown about, because people don't understand that those guidelines are due to change. I think there was a--how it's been portrayed in the media--some aspects just are fine, some aspects--like the helpful-sounding media, where it's like, "This is what we've 01:23:00accomplished" type of thing. Not "This is how we're--this is being changed again, does CDC even know what they're talking about?" We do. These guidelines are changing based off of new data. But you know--so some caveats to having that kind of overarching transparency of what we're doing also leads to some of this questioning.

Q: Yes, it does. The misinformation that came out of all of that was part of the whole guidance change, and I think it was a different way of how we put our data out there, and it came from many sources. Then at some point in time we were silenced, and NIH took over the messaging--Dr. [Anthony] Fauci became very, very well-known, whereas our director was not as well-known. I think that was part of it, maybe--it was a different messaging system. Now Dr. Walensky has stepped up 01:24:00and said, "No, we will control our message." I think that's really helped. I don't know if you--if you disagree or agree with me, that's fine.

HARTLOGE: I don't know if I do or don't. I think it's still evolving; we're still figuring out how to do messaging, when to--one of the bigger things recently has been when to release the messaging. The timing of everything is--we don't want to drop mask guidance or release the new guidance right in the middle of a spike of COVID cases. I think a lot of the timing of things has also led to some questioning by the public and media sources.

Q: Yes. All right, so we're going to go to the future now. Knowing what you know now, what do you think people need to know for the future?

HARTLOGE: Like I was just talking about--

Q: Timing?

HARTLOGE: --the timing is a big thing. But also, the role of politicians and the 01:25:00role of celebrities in all of this. When vaccines were first rolling out you saw a lot of celebrities and politicians going to get vaccinated very publicly and getting it videoed or photos to encourage people. But on the other side, you also saw the exact opposite. You saw some politicians heightening people's fears of the vaccine or making more questions out in the public than really needed to be. Having questions is one thing but questioning everything down to the point where you're interfering with people's lives or livelihood or possibility of living, surviving a virus--I think politicians and celebrities just need to be aware that their words have major impacts. CDC on the whole, everyone, you know, 01:26:00just kind of needs to be aware that everything you say can impact someone's life to such a detrimental effect, especially in a pandemic.

Q: Absolutely.

HARTLOGE: You know, somebody not getting vaccinated could mean that they can get severe illness or die from it if they chose not to get vaccinated because somebody said it wasn't great to do.

Q: Right, and they get their messaging on social media.

HARTLOGE: Correct.

Q: Right? We've upped our ante on social media as well, so--to make sure that is also covered. Is there anything else you'd like to let the people know about this time for you? Has it hardened your interest in public health? Has it spurred your thoughts on more policy, more open doors? What?

HARTLOGE: On one aspect, COVID-19 had a major impact on people's mental health 01:27:00and things like that, and myself very much included, with understanding all the mental health aspect. But in another way, COVID also helped me with confidence. It was a very strange side effect that it had, but knowing that--having family members come to me just because I do work at CDC and they knew I was helping out on the response, just coming to me and asking, "Well, what are your thoughts on this?" Being able to tell them, "I'm personally--" while I cannot speak for CDC on any platform or in any capacity, I can tell them that personally I don't feel comfortable going out and eating inside of a restaurant. They say, "Why?" Because I understand the air flow of things and how that might affect people eating and things like that. Knowing that what I was saying was scientifically 01:28:00backed, I got this competence in speaking with my family members, especially the ones that have different views, that don't understand this from a different point of view. Being confident in what I do on a day-to-day basis and where I stand just grew in that, strangely, out of a pandemic.

Q: Well, how nice. Were you able to convince any family members that they may--of opposing views that they were--and they changed their mind maybe?

HARTLOGE: There were some that were more heavily questioning, but not to the point where they wouldn't get vaccinated. They were still going to get vaccinated and things like that. I was able to help kind of ease their mind in understanding why it is a good idea, what it means to get vaccinated. I always tried to check in with them after their vaccination, ask them how they're feeling, because the vaccines hit people different ways. Then there's always going to be those family members or friends that you just can't convince, 01:29:00regardless of whatever you say.

Q: True, there is that. I mean, a lot of them think that the vaccine came out so quickly that it's not trustworthy, where they don't really understand it had been worked on for many, many years previous.

HARTLOGE: That was the primary thing that I told a lot of the family members that were skeptic about the vaccine at first, was that--making them understand that this was something that the science community has been working on for ages. We were already over halfway through with knowing where to go. We just had to do that last little part. That's why we were able to come up with a vaccine so quickly.

Q: Yes, I think it's really important to get that recorded.

HARTLOGE: Yes. It helped change a lot of my family members' minds of going, "Okay, so this isn't, like, a huge questioning vaccine? Like, there has been data done?" Tons. There's been lots of research done on it. It wasn't as quick as people thought it was. Even myself, in the very beginning, because I didn't 01:30:00understand all of that until someone told me about all of the different data, I even thought--I was like, "Okay, well, is this vaccine coming out quick?" Myself. But then I was like, oh, well, they were already halfway done--of course they're already done with it. They already had so much research to back it.

Q: Right. Can you explain what the difference is, the mRNA [messenger ribonucleic acid] type of vaccine, rather than the inactivated or activated?

HARTLOGE: I can't because I don't understand all of it myself.

Q: Right. To me it's such a cool vaccine--I still have to wrap my head around how it happened, because it's a different way. It's not like, "This is the vaccine and we've inactivated it but it's going to do this to your immune system." Totally different--it's on an RNA kind of level.

HARTLOGE: Oh, and so in terms of talking about the future and everything else, with the response being such a big thing, it was such a great experience for me 01:31:00personally. I enjoyed all the time I had worked in public health up to that point, but then the response, I don't know, hit that lightbulb moment--had that kind of effect on me, where I'm just like, okay, this is definitely where I'm supposed to be, this is, you know, finding that confidence level just made it where I knew I was supposed to be in public health. This is the direction I was supposed to go, career-wise. Circling back to my midlife crisis at the age of twenty-one, leaving undergrad and not sure where I was going, to now going back for a master's program, I'm now trying to get my master's in public health.

Q: Oh, that's awesome.

HARTLOGE: At the University of Florida, through their online program, and eventually I'll end up trying to get my doctorate in something along the way.

Q: Good for you.

HARTLOGE: Not sure what direction that'll eventually go, but--

Q: It will expose itself soon enough.

HARTLOGE: Exactly. That's one of the most fascinating things about public health, is that it's so encompassing. It has so many different routes within it, and I really appreciate that, because being a military brat, I'm very versatile, adaptable type thing, and I like being able to handle a little bit of everything. Public health is very much that--it's a little bit of everything.

Q: Yes. Yes, it is. It's a really wonderful field. I knew nothing about it either, until I started here. I was like, wow. I thought CDC was all about just a virus.

HARTLOGE: Just one.

Q: Yes, just one virus. It's so much more.

HARTLOGE: Yes. Now public health is going from a direction of infectious diseases to doing more chronic diseases and looking at safety, and it encompasses environmental health and air quality and all those sorts of things. It's a very interesting field.

Q: Yes, well, and it's all about the public's health.

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Yes. I love it. Okay, so I think we've come to a time now where we're almost 01:33:00done, but I wanted to ask--what haven't we covered that you would like to share?

HARTLOGE: I think we covered everything.

Q: Yes?

HARTLOGE: Yes.

Q: Oh, my gosh. I've done it. I've done it. All right, well, Claire Hartloge, that was very nice talking to you today, and I hope you get your master's.

HARTLOGE: Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]