Rafaelina Moran has daily contact with COVID-19 patients, but she’s not a medical professional. The environmental service worker is in charge of cleaning, disinfecting, mopping and emptying garbage for COVID patients at Hackensack University Medical Center.

“I used to go into the room and not think about. Just come out, wash my hands, go home, take my sneakers off, my clothes, and take a shower and do my regular routine. We are here to serve them. We clean,” said Moran.

Moran, a mother of two, is one of 600 unsung heroes at Hackensack University Medical Center that are risking their lives, alongside medical staff, to save others lives.

“Aside from our frontline heroes and heroines we have many unsung heroes. They ran into the fire, and the fire was really an inferno. When we had the surge during the pandemic of COVID-19 patients coming in, we were overwhelmed with the number of patients versus the number of beds we had. In a period of six days, our plant operations team converted our entire team member cafeteria into a 74-bed patient care unit,” said Mark Sparta, president of Hackensack University Medical Center.

“We were taking windows out and putting boards in and we were using HEPA filters to vent out the rooms. We were making them so that they are all negative pressure,” said Fred Freschi, a carpenter in the plant operations department.

Freschi, another unsung hero, has never put together a negative pressure room, but he immediately put a team together to figure it out. The father of four says his biggest motivator was watching patients’ health improve.

“Whenever we were needed to stay, we stayed and got everything done. We made a difference. They were in the rooms, they were safe and they got to go home to their families,” he said.

Brian Jacobs dedicated his time to preparing, installing and monitoring all the monitors and ventilators used by COVID patients. Jacobs, like so many invisible heroes, risked exposing his family and 6-month-old son to the virus.

“The majority of our time was spent with patient monitoring,” he said. “We put a few hundred of them in service. This was one of the floors; We put 26 here in a matter of an 8-hour period. This is something you would normally spend a few months preparing and planning for,” said Jacobs, supervisor of biomedical engineering at Hackensack University Medical Center.

Randy Battistus was only four months on the job when COVID hit. The father of two says the fear of getting COVID didn’t stop him from helping others.

“All you see is sadness for a long period of time and for a lot of hours a day. Every floor you go to you see patients in hospital beds, on ventilators,” Battistus, a maintenance mechanic, said. “The nurses, they’re the frontline, they’re incredible, absolutely what they do is remarkable. But they do need us, and we make their job easier and they know it. You don’t realize what it takes to run a hospital — every position from the laundry to the garbage, they’re just as important.”