HOW COVID-19 CHANGED MINNESOTANS

A kickboxing nurse, a dancer who hopes to walk again, and a defiant bar owner reflect how the pandemic changed lives in Minnesota.

Galante still feels panic when one of her older patients struggles with COVID-19. It’s a hidden scar the Mercy Hospital nurse bears after witnessing so much death during the pandemic.

Coping is becoming easier over time because her hospital has more treatment options than it did when COVID emerged five years ago this month, so she’s losing far fewer patients.

There’s also the kickboxing.

Galante, 47, had already hit bottom in 2021 when her brother persuaded her to try fighting. The pandemic was at its worst and her marriage was ending. The Elk River nurse needed something, anything, but never imagined that punching, kicking and occasionally kneeing opponents would work.

“Everything was so sad,” she recalled. “I held patients’ hands when they died. I did the Zoom meetings because you couldn’t have visitors in their rooms. The state’s death toll reached nearly 17,000 — more than the populations of Bemidji or Robbinsdale.

But the pandemic’s toll affected the living as well. Stories abound of how COVID upset lives, shuttered businesses, disrupted education and divided people socially and politically.

People often unite in times of crisis, but the pandemic was different, said Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a University of Minnesota sociologist. People who lost loved ones to COVID struggled to relate to people who blamed government efforts to reduce the spread of COVID for mental or economic hardships, she said.

“Everybody experienced a break from the norm, all at the same time, but everybody’s break from the norm was so different,” she said.

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