Crookston Community Pool manager and Crookston Pirate Tennis coach, Cody Brekken was called up with his battalion in the North Dakota National Guard last month to assist with COVID-19 testing sites based in Fargo.
Brekken said the things have settled down after a wild first couple of weeks with North Dakota ramping up its testing capacity. “I’ve been on a mission for about 31 days now and we’re finally getting into a rhythm on the ground here,” said Brekken. “The first two weeks were pretty wild. North Dakota was really starting to ramp up their testing and they’ve tripled their output in the three to four weeks when we came on. That was a process to figure out how to get that done with the resources we had.”
Brekken’s battalion is expected to stay active through the Fourth of July weekend. “I think we’ll be close that 45-day mark,” said Brekken. “The week after the Fourth sometime. Our battalion will be relieved off of the mission and another battalion will come in to take over. We have half our battalion, team west, in Bismarck and the other half which falls under my command on team east out of Fargo. That’s how we’ve been running the mission.”
The battalion has been responsible not only for operating test sites across the state but also for transporting all of the state’s COVID-19 tests to the state lab. “Some details on what we’ve been doing,” said Brekken. “We’re broken down into static testing sites. So, we’ve got some sites at Fargo that stay there every day and they’re testing some of the long-term care facilities, some of the businesses that are willing to come to us every day to get tested once a week. These are our recurring customers that keep coming back to get tested to work their job. Then, we’ve got mobile testing sites. Like today, we went out to Grand Forks to the University of North Dakota to conduct tests for UND students and staff. Anybody that’s living in a congregate setting or those types of audiences often get prioritized on where these test kits go. And finally, business-based testing. This is specifically Fargo, where we’ve got small teams that can show up to a group home or a business or a facility where they can’t come to us. We’ll go to them during the day and conduct tests on-site. Those are the testing scenarios as well as the National Guard has been tasked with transporting all the tests to the state lab in Bismarck. That’s ones that we conduct, and the ones different long-term care facilities are conducting in all corners of the state. In North Dakota, they’re completing 5,000-6,000 tests a day.”
Brekken said he’s been impressed with the safety measures for the soldiers including having the proper protective equipment and protocols for testing. “I’ve been really impressed,” said Brekken. “We’ve been supplied really well. Anytime we’re conducting these tests every solider has an N95 mask, and we’ve got protocols for gloves and our aprons for those conducting the swabs. It’s been a joint effort. We’ve been using all military medical personnel to conduct the swabs but now we’re in the transition of starting to hand it over to say Fargo Public Health or surrounding communities to provide nurses and we just come in as their mail service or demographic personnel getting information from the user to be tested. Civilian personnel starts coming in to take these roles over.”
Brekken’s previous experiences with the guard include flood operations and protests, but he said it’s been interesting to see the coordination for a different type of emergency management scenario. “It’s been fun to see the coordination on a state level of how that’s done in these emergency management scenarios,” said Brekken. “It’s been eye-opening for me. You know, National Guard it’s pretty common to be in flood ops. North Dakota was familiar with the DAPL (Dakota Access Pipeline) protests a few years back, those types of scenarios. This COVID-19 one is a pretty brand new one for everybody. It’s been a pretty good learning experience on the guard perspective to see how to conduct a different type of emergency operation. It’s been good on that part.”
Despite learning a lot, Brekken said he’s excited to get back to Crookston and get the community pool reopened. “It’s been a lot of work, but it’s been great, and a good experience to see the other side of things I’m not quite used to,” said Brekken. “It’s been an awesome learning experience for me, but I am excited to get back to Crookston and get back to my normal daily life back there. And get the pool open again and turn back to my civilian job. I’m excited for that.”
