The story from the front lines: N.S. COVID testers top 900,000 swabs

Gloria Mallard will never forget the first time she swabbed a stranger's nose for COVID-19.

"I recently looked at a journal entry for that day and I think the first two words were 'terrifying' and 'weird,'" she said.

"I think I just couldn't believe where I was and what I was doing."

When the pandemic started, Mallard was on a Princess Cruise ship sailing the South Pacific. She'd been living and working on the ocean for 14 years, when suddenly her career was docked.

Mallard, who is originally from P.E.I., flew back to her home base in Halifax. She decided she wouldn't spend the pandemic on the sidelines.

"I thought I'd get in the ring with this big monster that played a part in why I was here for a winter," she said. Mallard swapped sea life for PPE, and got a job with Nova Scotia Health's COVID testing team.

The staff are about to hit a major milestone. With more than 917,000 tests performed, they've nearly done one for every resident of the province.

Mallard guesses she's responsible for 6,000 of those nose swabs.

"You get the hang of it pretty quickly when you do a few hundred," she said.

"I didn't expect to have regulars. We've got lots of folks that come in over and over again. We've actually formed some very unlikely friendships."

Among those new connections is one she's formed with Bonnie Kendell-Ashford.

Kendell-Ashford, a nurse, was performing nasopharyngeal swabs for things like influenza long before COVID-19 existed.

When cases started spreading in the province, she was among the first to raise her hand and offer to do tests.

Her first assignment was Northwood, the epicentre of the virus in Nova Scotia. Kendell-Ashford said even as numbers spiked, she never worried about her own safety.

"Thirty-eight staff and not one tested positive," she said of the team that tested Northwood residents. "The handwashing, the PPE. It all works."

The nurse said there's a trick to the tests — one that she's taught her colleagues, leading Mallard to give her the nickname "the professor."

"I do not go straight in, no two noses are the same. I kind of go in on a circular motion," said Kendell-Ashford.

She said she's tested everyone from six-week-old babies to people in their 90s.

"I've never been thanked so much as I have since I took this job. Even though I've been doing nursing for 31 years. I've never been thanked so much," she said.

Mallard said the experience has been eye-opening. Her team has become a second family.

"I'm really proud of where I live," she said. "I think that we as Nova Scotians, and sort of more broadly as Atlantic Canadians, really came together."

While case numbers in the third wave have finally dropped off, the need for testing continues.

Mallard and Kendell-Ashford said they'll continue to be at the Bayers Lake testing site, adding hundreds more tests to their tally.

That is, until Mallard's old job starts up again and calls her back to the sea.