(TNS) - Before the coronavirus pandemic, Irene Teper worked full time as a primary care doctor seeing mostly healthy patients for their routine checkups or non-emergency care. That all changed in March.

“We have been going kind of nonstop since March,” said Teper, who works at MarinHealth in Novato. “There would be weeks where we would work on weekends as well. It’s literally nonstop.”

As the pandemic worsened, Teper was tapped by MarinHealth to establish an adult care clinic where doctors would treat patients showing COVID-19 symptoms. Now Teper is assisting her colleague, internal medicine doctor Elizabeth Lowe, with the mobile testing of the county’s most vulnerable residents in nursing homes and residential care centers where cases had spread rapidly in recent months.

“I didn’t feel like I had any other options really. I was asked to do it. Someone had to do it,” Teper said.

The four-day workweeks and 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shifts are long behind her. Teper’s days now start with meetings at 7 a.m. and don’t end until 12 hours later. She’s still able to see patients in her primary care duties, but mostly through video checkups twice a week.

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