GoHeels Exclusive: Osterman on the Front Lines in California
July 28, 2020 | Women's Lacrosse, Featured Writers
By Pat James, GoHeels.com
A clinical associate professor of emergency medicine at Los Angeles County+USC Medical Center, Jess Osterman never expected to be on the front lines of a global pandemic, even as the coronavirus started to spread across the U.S. in early March.
In fact, when she enrolled at North Carolina in 1999 and joined the women's lacrosse team, she wasn't even thinking of pursuing a career in health care. She instead planned to be an FBI agent.
"I had grown up in a very legally-oriented family, and I thought that was what I was going to do," Osterman told GoHeels.com recently. "But I did some volunteering at the ER at UNC while I was an undergrad, and I totally fell in love with medicine as a specialty, especially emergency medicine. And I knew that's what I wanted to do."
Little did she know she'd find herself in the situation she's now in 17 years after she graduated from UNC.
Days before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on March 11, Osterman said she was still planning to attend an emergency medicine conference that week in New York City. But, at the last minute, she decided not to go. And thankfully, she says she didn't, as five people who attended the conference ended up testing positive for the virus.
"Everything snowballed after that," Osterman said. "Within a week, our hospital started being inundated with cases. We had to completely change how we intake patients into the hospital."
That included the creation of a pod dedicated to treating coronavirus patients, where hospital workers wear hazmat suits and Osterman has served as an attending doctor the past four months.
Osterman said LAC+USC, one of the largest public hospitals in the country, primarily serves uninsured and undocumented patients. Normally, the hospital mostly treats primary care issues. But the number of those complaints has dropped significantly, with the majority of patients having been treated for the virus. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, no county in the U.S. has had more coronavirus cases than Los Angeles County's 173,995.
In treating some of those cases, Osterman said she's relied on the lessons she learned in teamwork and communication as a Carolina lacrosse player.
"Especially when you're in all the gear and you can't hear anyone, being a really clear communicator and making sure your team knows what's going on is probably of the utmost importance in taking care of these patients," she said. "And just the experience of working with a team in college on the lacrosse team and communicating, being a leader and things like that have really translated well to my medical practice and have really been things that have been in the forefront during this crisis."
Osterman knows many Americans don't believe the virus is as serious as it is and that they need to wear a face mask in public. But she urges that everyone does, especially because of the asymptomatic spread of the virus.
"At the beginning of all this, we thought if you did temperature checks and people were symptomatic and you kept them home, that would kind of curb the spread of this," she said. "But I think it's really underestimated the asymptomatic spread and the fact that it really can affect someone from any age. We've seen kids with it at our hospital, we've seen 20-year-olds, 30-year-olds, 40-year-olds who are super, super sick.
"So, my big message would be to remember that even if you're not having symptoms, you could be spreading it to other people, and wearing a mask is the No. 1 thing you can do to help protect those around you. And also, just because you're young and you're healthy, it's not going to protect you from this disease. It can really affect anyone."