By: Conor Stevens
The COVID-19 Pandemic has brought a massive amount of work to the Center for Disease Control in their need to research the virus and produce a vaccine, but a group of employees may be going through even more stress than the scientists.
The CDC has a network of Information Technology employees logging and storing data in over 12,000 databases keeping records and files on all CDC research up to date and secure. The COVID-19 Pandemic brought an upsurge in the amount of work required from these IT workers, and it all had to be done from a different location.
“Like the rest of the world we had to find a way to do our job from home,” Pat Elam said, a Senior Database Administrator at the CDC. “It wasn’t an easy adjustment, we went from being on a localized campus where the work flowed pretty seamlessly, and overnight we had to move our operation to our homes.”
Elam described the struggle of working from home as fatiguing, but still necessary. Elam works hand in hand with John Stevens, a Senior Project Manager, to upkeep and maintain the databases storing information necessary for public safety. With thousands of servers to maintain on any given day performing critical restoration and maintenance is a never ending chore, and adding the COVID-19 virus to the list threw another problem into the delicate balance.
The process of maintaining, performing maintenance, and recovering a damaged server could take hours on end said Elam. It is not as simple as dragging files back into the server. If a server goes down, and they do not act quick in order to save data, the ramifications could be detrimental. “When you’re dealing with potential life saving files there is zero room for errors, and we don’t get a second chance,” Elam said. When a server goes down, the database recovery team must access the SRN, Site Recovery Network, an additional off campus server that stores copies of all database entries and files. The team must then move all files back over to the main network and find the error in the code that caused the shutdown. Elam said the process could take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours depending on the size of the server. “The difficult part is catching the one server with an error out of the 10,000 our team manages,” Elam said laughing. The addition of COVID-19 and all the new data being compiled made for late nights and early mornings in the new reality of being a CDC employee.
“I couldn’t even tell you how many times we had an issues in the middle of the night and my phone wouldn’t stop ringing until I picked up,” Scott Covington said, an IT worker responsible for server management. Covington was not shy in how he felt about the issues and emphasized just how taxing the long days and nights were on him. Mornings for Covington began sometimes at 4 a.m. and could last well into the evening. The average CDC database related to the COVID virus has seen an upswing of 200 percent of data entry in the last 12 months. This exponential increase has caused the amount of work behind the scenes at CDC to also increase at rates nobody was expecting. While the spotlight of the media was on lead CDC officials and scientists the IT employees were hard at work ensuring everything was operating smoothly.
Patricia Dunham, another Senior Database Manager, laughed when asked about the change that COVID brought. “I was just waiting on that call from Fox for my interview since so many CDC employees were being interviewed,” Dunham joked. “But in all seriousness, I know how important the work they’re doing for us is, and I’m glad to be a part of the team keeping their jobs going.” The team had a sense of pride about them shared with Dunham that they recognized their jobs weren’t as glamorous as those who were studying the virus and working to find a vaccine, but they were just as necessary.
The media scramble of COVID-19 makes it easy to focus our attention on the scientists and health officials on the news, but without the unsung heroes managing thousands of databases, and hundred of thousands of terabytes of data should not be overlooked. As the team continues to adapt to a new work life, the late nights will continue even without the recognition this team greatly deserves.