J

en Galante still feels panic when one of her older patients struggles with COVID-19. It’s a hidden scar on the Mercy Hospital nurse from 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. If I didn’t have that outlet, mentally, I don’t think I would have done very well.”

Minnesota and Minnesotans have changed in many unexpected ways since the first COVID case was identified in the state on March 6, 2020 in a doctor who was infected while on a cruise.

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.

For Jen Galante, kickboxing started as a coping mechanism, but became much more. She developed close relationships and gained confidence at her gym, Clarke’s MMA and Boxing in Rogers. (Aaron Lavinsky, The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Urgent change

Many nurses quit after losing patients or getting sick themselves. Galante persevered after 20 years as a hospital nurse, but she needed to make changes at work. As a float nurse, she used to take any open shifts, but she couldn’t go back after the pandemic to the intensive care unit where she confronted so much death.

Kickboxing started as a coping mechanism, but ended up as far more. She developed close relationships and gained confidence at her gym, Clarke’s MMA and Boxing. Her two teenage children encouraged her.

After two official matches, she entered a cage match in Des Moines, Iowa, last December. Galante took hard punches to the face and a kick to the stomach. She absorbed the blows and started dodging and shifting and backing up her opponent.

“I love knees,” she said. “I know it’s weird, but I would like put her to the cage and I just hit her with my knees.”

Galante won the fight, and befriended her opponent. They plan to train together.

Constance Scheurer, 69, is still waiting for her second act after the pandemic. The former ballerina and Vegas showgirl hasn’t walked since she was hospitalized in summer 2020 with severe COVID.

“I was on the biggest stages in the world, and even in Europe at age 15,” the Minneapolis resident said. “And now my feet are useless.”

The nerves carrying signals from her brain to her limbs became inflamed, resulting in leg pain and weakness. Doctors suspect COVID either caused the nerve damage or aggravated a prior condition.

As many as 700,000 Minnesota adults endured so-called long COVID after their initial illnesses, according to a federal survey last fall. Most recovered. Scheurer is among the estimated 50,000 with severe, lingering impairments. An overreaction by the immune system seems to trigger long COVID, but why it hits some people and not others is unclear.

Scheurer still attends concerts at Orchestra Hall. She carries the memories of her family’s musical legacy. Her German-born grandfather was an assistant concertmaster who helped build the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra by recruiting musicians from Europe. Her father was a lead bass player in the orchestra.

She taught dance at a studio in Woodbury after ending a professional career in 1983 that spanned Boston Ballet, MTV in Hollywood and the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Now, watching ballet is frustrating. She hopes surgery or exercises can help her regain mobility.

“If I walk with a walker,” she said, “I will be very pleased.”

Constance Scheurer at her caretaker’s home in St. Anthony. The former ballerina and showgirl lost her ability to walk after two severe bouts of COVID-19. “If I walk with a walker,” she said, “I will be very pleased.” (Aaron Lavinsky, the Minnesota Star Tribune)

Infamous protest

Minnesota tried to limit severe COVID by reducing the person-to-person spread of the virus that causes the disease.

Gov. Tim Walz closed schools and businesses like most governors when COVID emerged in spring 2020, and ordered a partial lockdown for four weeks that winter to buy time until a COVID vaccine was available. The state also mandated indoor mask-wearing for nearly a year and aggressively promoted COVID vaccinations.

Minnesota had the ninth-lowest COVID death rate among states and the 10th lowest rate of long COVID, according to federal data. But it also ranked in one think tank’s analysis among the 10 worst for economic and academic declines during the pandemic.

Lisa Zarza moved her business, Outpost Bar and Grill, to Wisconsin after losing her liquor license in Minnesota. She was not political before the pandemic, but the losses of the lockdown orders pushed her to activism. Last month, she testified at a hearing on state legislation to limit lockdowns in future public health emergencies. (Aaron Lavinsky, the Minnesota Star Tribune)

Lisa Zarza protested Minnesota’s approach, and it cost her the two bars she operated and her dream home in Lakeville, Minn.

She complied at first with state orders, closing Alibi Drinkery in Lakeville and Froggy Bottoms in Northfield in spring 2020 and gradually re-opening them with outdoor seating and indoor capacity restrictions. But she ignored Walz’s second shutdown order, arguing it was unfair to ban indoor seating at bars and restaurants during the holidays while retailers remained open.

Trouble is, she thought another 300 bars would join her. Only about 10 stayed open, and they were made infamous examples when Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison ordered them closed. Zarza later lost her liquor licenses over her stance.

“If we would have been 300 strong, I wouldn’t have lost everything,” she said.

A pandemic ban on evictions allowed her to keep her house for a while, but the mother of three eventually sold it after filing for bankruptcy. Zarza moved this winter to a mobile home in Wisconsin, where she has started over and opened Outpost Bar and Grill in Bay City, Wis., a popular stop for bikers and travelers.

Zarza didn’t vote before the pandemic, but has become political. Conservative media featured her during the election when Walz was running for vice president. She testified at a hearing last month on state legislation to limit lockdowns in future public health emergencies.

“I didn’t realize that I was going to make so many people hate me and love me at the same time,” she said.

Lisa Zarza gets her last large item loaded onto a trailer for her move from a rental home in Rosemount to her new home in Wisconsin. Zarza ran two bars in Minnesota and in 2020 defied Gov. Walz's COVID shutdown orders, leading to a series of legal troubles that led to her move to Wisconsin. (Aaron Lavinsky, the Minnesota Star Tribune)

Keeping schools closed

The lockdowns had limited impact on slowing the virus' spread, said Michael Osterholm, director of the U’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Government officials were never going to be able to keep them in place long enough to stymie the coronavirus, he said. Lockdowns also receive too much blame, considering the first one was scaled back in two months and didn’t apply to the majority of Minnesota workers with jobs deemed essential.

But the school closures had consequences. Given only weeks to launch online classrooms in spring 2020, schools struggled to maintain student learning.

A state with some of the best test scores in the U.S. saw only 44% of students meet math proficiency standards in 2021, a decline of 11 percentage points from pre-pandemic results. And scores haven’t rebounded.

Kadee Watkins recalled getting a message from another mother who was observing an online classroom in 2020 for their Orono first-graders.

“What’s [your daughter] doing with those scissors?” the mother asked. Watkins turned in shock to see her daughter cutting her hair on camera.

Watkins, 49, had taken time off as a physician assistant to be a stay-at-home mother. She opted to homeschool her two grade-school daughters instead of continuing with online instruction: “It took just a few days and I was like, ‘All right, this isn’t working.‘”

Online learning had some benefits during the pandemic, making students self-reliant and tech savvy, but it caused them to miss out on social interactions that are vital for emotional growth and development during the grade school years, said Rebecca Jackson, a vice president of Brain Balance, a training program that seeks to boost cognitive function. The North Carolina-based organization has a clinic in Woodbury that has been helping children since the pandemic.

Children can catch up with practice, but many ended up years behind in cognitive development and were then placed in situations for which they weren’t prepared, she said. “We’re still getting our driver’s licenses at the same age and all of those things.”

The pandemic proved oddly beneficial for Watkins, allowing the single mother to bond with her four children on road trips across Minnesota and forcing them to deal with unresolved stresses in their family.

Watkins was motivated by the experience to switch careers, becoming a financial adviser with training in helping clients manage divorces.

It was a happy ending that was taboo to discuss during the pandemic as others faced illnesses or even deaths, she said. “So many other people were really struggling.”

Kindergarten-age students do distance learning from Tierra Encantada, a Spanish immersion daycare and preschool, in October 2020. (David Joles, The Minnesota Star Tribune)

COVID never left

COVID deaths are less common than during pandemic surges, including a peak in winter 2020 when Minnesota was losing 100 people per day to the coronavirus. But one legacy of the pandemic is an infectious disease that won’t go away.

COVID still caused more deaths this winter than influenza, and remains a particular risk to older people or younger adults with health problems.

Mae Brooks lost a brother-in-law in 2020, and then her husband, Robert Belton, in February 2024 after the pandemic emergency had been lifted. Both died from COVID.

Belton had been careful for years because he had a kidney transplant in 2019 and needed to take drugs that weakened his immune system. The couple wore masks everywhere and even tried UV light exposure early in the pandemic when there was hope that it killed the virus.

Belton returned home sick from a relative’s graduation in California in late 2023. He was hospitalized on New Year’s Eve 2023 and later placed on a breathing tube after his lungs failed.

The pandemic had been hard on Belton, who co-founded a construction and home remodeling business with his brother and loved meeting new clients, playing jazz saxophone with groups, and celebrating large family gatherings. He couldn’t see his brother in the hospital when he died in 2020, and could only talk with him by videoconferencing.

“That’s how he said goodbye to his brother,” Brooks said.

After Belton died last year, his wife used donations from friends to place a memorial bench at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden in Theodore Wirth Regional Park in Minneapolis. Belton had spent Sundays after church there as a child, and loved the untamed natural areas there as an adult.

When the anniversary of Belton’s death approached last month, Brooks knew she couldn’t be at the house that was filled with her husband’s decorations and renovations. She also made changes, getting rid of her husband’s coffee supplies and the comfy chair where he often nodded off to sleep.

“It was a great chair and ottoman,” she said, “but every time I would look at it, that was what I would visualize.”

Nurse Jen Galante cares for a patient at Mercy Hospital last month. During the pandemic, Galante suffered stress and depression as she watched so many patients die. Now hospitals have far more options for treatment. (Aaron Lavinsky, the Minnesota Star Tribune)

about the writer

Jeremy Olson