Los Alamos: America’s Healthiest County Has a Formula for Battling COVID
Tim Smart
With a doctorate in chemistry and a prior job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Cyndi Wells knew sooner than most the threat that COVID-19 posed for the country. As early as December 2019, as reports began surfacing of a virus in the Wuhan area in China, "I kind of knew the storm was coming," she recalls.
Her pet supply store, which Wells opened in 2005 in Los Alamos County, New Mexico, while she still worked at the lab, would be considered an essential service, so she began prepping for keeping it open during a pandemic. "We adopted masks quickly here," she says. "Some of the bigger challenges were getting the supplies in. We got our hand sanitizer from a distillery that had pivoted to making hand sanitizer."