Rapid Responder: State College native returns home to operate COVID-19 testing

In April 2020, State College native Michelle Mitinger retired as a firefighter lieutenant and paramedic from the Palm Beach Gardens Fire Department in Florida. After spending more than 16 years as a first responder, Mitinger felt it was time to leave the fire service, explaining that she needed to “let the young people fight the fires” and focus on practicing medicine full-time as a registered nurse.

Just 36 hours after “retiring,” Mitinger was on her first traveling-nurse deployment as a COVID-19 strike team member. This initial assignment would become the start of her COVID-19 support journey, which would surprisingly lead her back home to Happy Valley, where she would oversee COVID-19 testing centers as AMI Expeditionary Healthcare’s clinical lead for testing and vaccinations for Pennsylvania.

Mitinger’s parents, Robert and Marilyn, had moved to State College after Robert retired from the San Diego Chargers to raise Mitinger and her sister, Christine, in the family-friendly small town where Robert had attended college and played Division I football. After graduating from State College Area High School in 1986, Mitinger followed in her father’s footsteps, attending Penn State and graduating with her bachelor’s degree in 1990. She moved to Florida and, due to the encouragement of a neighbor, enrolled at Palm Beach State College to study fire science and firefighting.

“He said, ‘Go to fire school and become a paramedic. You get to run into fires, you get to dive into water, and you get to see patients,’” Mitinger says. “I was sold.”

Mitinger says after some years in the Palm Beach Gardens Fire Department, she applied everything she learned from fire service and emergency management and returned to Palm Beach State College to earn her nursing degree. Upon completing her associate degree in nursing, she continued to work full-time for the fire department and began working part-time as a pediatric emergency room nurse and a freelance flight nurse.

When the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States in early 2020, Mitinger decided it was time to step away from the fire service.

“When the pandemic hit, I thought, ‘Yes, this is the time,’” she says. “I’m going to take what I’ve learned and I’m going to hit the road as a travel nurse.’”

On her first deployment in Miami, she gained experience running COVID-19 testing and disease surveillance on a large scale, as her team was overseeing long-term-care facilities in the Miami tri-county area—more than 4,000 facilities.

“We learned a lot in a hurry,” Mitinger says. “It included emergency staffing, testing, and transferring of patients. It was a great experience and I had great leadership there, so I was able to learn a lot.”

When that contract ended, Mitinger returned home to Palm Beach and ran into her chief flight nurse at Costco. During their chat, Mitinger learned another coworker was on assignment in Aruba for a company called AMI Expeditionary Healthcare. This piqued her interest, so she began researching the company. After seeing AMI Expeditionary Healthcare’s international reach, with deployments in countries such as Australia and India, Mitinger knew this company could help her continue to make a difference.

A chat with the human resources director at AMI led to an assignment in Atlanta as a medic within 48 hours of the phone call.

“I was so impressed with AMI’s operation in Atlanta at the Georgia Convention Center, where they had set up an alternative care facility, that I knew I wanted to be a part of this company and a part of their endeavors as much as I could,” Mitinger says. “It was so well run, so organized. …I knew I would be with AMI whenever they wanted me.”

But, as contracts with travel nursing come and go, Mitinger returned to Palm Beach when the Atlanta assignment ended. Just as she was about to take a contract in Texas, she received a call from an AMI recruiter. The company needed a nurse in a “place that we’re not even really sure where it is in Pennsylvania.”

“She said, ‘It’s called State College,’” Mitinger laughs. “I said, ‘I do know where that is, and I will take that assignment.’ That was in October 2020. We were supposed to be here for three weeks.”

Mitinger says when she first got here, her team worked to build the first iteration of the COVID-19 testing center from the ground up in the former Macy’s location in the Nittany Mall.

Since then, AMI’s operations in Pennsylvania have expanded to seven teams across the state, and the Centre County location has moved multiple times before landing in its current site at the Centre County Refuse & Recycling Authority. Mitinger says the Centre County site is AMI’s only static site in the state because of the work of the local county commissions and Centre County’s centralized location. The site is scheduled to operate at CCRRA through the end of March.

As the registered nurse lead at the site, Mitinger manages the clinic and its polymerase chain reaction testing. In addition to completing administrative work with the emergency medical technicians and certified nursing assistants on site, Mitinger says she serves as an educator. Most people coming for tests ask questions about what they should do while they are symptomatic, how to treat symptoms, and exposure level and risk information.

“There is a lot of misinformation out there,” she says. “I keep my basic life support gear with me to do assessments, and I make sure people have the information they need.”

By providing testing services and educational information, Mitinger and her team are not only working to control the virus and its spread, but helping people get back to their lives as much as possible in the place she calls home.

“We play a vital role in getting people back on their feet, back to work, back to normalcy,” she says. “It’s been great to come back here to where I grew up and to be able to give back to this community in a place my parents’ influence runs deep. I just operate in a way that I hope makes them proud.

“I’m happy to be here to give back to the community that made me, that gave me my basis, my morals, and my values. I hope that I’ve come back to leave a legacy of good deeds and that I’ve left a positive footprint—I’m just happy to be able to be here to help.” T&G

Samantha Chavanic is a freelance writer for Town&Gown.