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meIt wasn’t that long ago that the staff was caught in the throat of a stranger. Or at the top of the nose. Where doctors suspect the virus. Vanessa Op te Roodt now carefully holds the cane in her left hand. Take the tweezers with your right hand. Snap! The short cut end slides into a clear plastic container filled with a clear liquid. Op te Roodt puts the long end of the stick aside and reaches for the next plastic tube. Unscrew and remove the new rod. Before replacing the pliers, briefly hold the metal over the Bunsen burner flame. “A few seconds on each side,” he says. Then the tool is sterilized. Every little drop of the old sample evaporates, every bit of virus burns. Op te Roodt says, “We just play it safe.”
The work is monotonous, the movements are repeated. But they are important. Without testing, the best pandemic plan can do nothing. Because no one knows who was infected with Corona and where doctors and authorities should act first. Vanessa Op te Roodt has learned to live with this responsibility. It would be fatal to become careless now. If the sample fell on the table, that would be a problem. If Op te Roodt were accidentally infected, it would be a disaster. One frame contains 30 samples, they stand upright like candles. The employee uses the English term for rack. After a maximum of four racks, Op te Roodt needs a break. For an hour, he then prepared smears of people who may have contracted the coronavirus for further examination. Sample after sample, it always works like this: unscrew, remove, cut, save. To speed things up, Op te Roodt always has two pliers on hand, which he uses alternately. Because two? “Take it,” he says and hands him the pliers he was holding over the flame. “Boiling!”
In Ingelheim’s lab they are back to work piecework that night. Many colleagues have already gone home, but things are still going well in the Corona apartment. Two employees each share a hallway, sit back to back, and cool neon light floods the room from above. Op de Roodt wears a light blue protective gown, gloves, mask and goggles. She has tied her hair in a bun. “Sometimes you’re exhausted when the shelf fills up and you can’t see the end,” he says. The outer darkness has already settled on the Rhine.
More work than ever
Op te Roodt’s late shift. The samples that you are currently preparing for examination have the highest priority. Full frames are marked with red tape, two letters are repeatedly written in black: “KH”. That means “hospital”, that’s where the commitments were made. As long as there are raw racks with red tape around, Op te Roodt is not coming home. “Especially the hospital samples, they are still done at night on the last shift. So they can go to the machine for their exam at night. ” In each run, the device creates dozens of samples at a time. It takes five hours to answer the crucial question: Who has Crown? And who is not
