Dozens of times a day in Covid-19 wards across California, a scene like this takes place: A hospital chaplain watches a death by machine.
Kristin Michealsen, a hospital chaplain in Los Angeles, stood by a man’s bed and held his hand. His family members only gathered a few minutes from the hospital at their home – they were not allowed in the hospital ward. The patient’s heart had just stopped. Mrs. Michealsen, an ordained minister, was watching a computer monitor as she accompanied the man to the edge of his life. Eighty beats per minute. Sixty. Forty.
California has averaged 433 deaths a day in the past week. On Tuesday, it became the state with the largest number of coronavirus deaths, surpassing New York.
In the impersonal math of the pandemic, there are two ways to view the devastation of the virus in California. As America’s most populous state, California has by far the most cases in the country – more than 3.4 million – and now the most deaths. But adjusted for its large population, California has a lower mortality rate than 31 states and Washington DC
With about 114 deaths per 100,000 people, the state has about half the rate of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts or Mississippi. The difference between New York and California could be even greater if one considers the likelihood that New York undercounted deaths in the early stages of the pandemic because virus testing was so limited.
However, these mitigating statistics mean little to the families of the more than 44,900 people who died in California from the virus. The numbers also do not mean much to chaplains like me. Michealsen, who on that day in January, when the photo was taken by an Associated Press photographer, had already seen two other patients die. Often she is the only other person in the room when death comes. Sometimes a nurse holds the other hand of the dying patient.
“When we enter this world, we are immediately surrounded by people – we have human touch,” she said. Michealsen said last week from Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills ward in Los Angeles. “I just think that when we leave this world, we should have the same.”
The pandemic took an unequal toll in California, with people in the south and Central Valley agriculture being hit much harder than those in the north.
But even in San Francisco, where nearly 350 people have died from the virus, the cruelty of the pandemic – the inability of families to surround their dying family members, contributes to the disruption of centuries-old rituals of mourning.
“I have never in 15 years experienced the multiple loss we now experience,” said Naomi Tzril Saks, a chaplain at the University of California Medical Center in Parnassus Heights. Like chaplains across the country, Ms. Saks and her colleagues did everything in their power to rectify the cruel isolation of the disease.
“We’ve zoomed in on bands and people who play the violin,” she said. Saks said. “We zoomed in on the son of a person who was locked up and she had not seen him for years before she died.”
Chaplains went to virtual shelters to avoid emotional burnout, Ms. Saks said. Some have joined national support groups.
“There are stories and experiences from this pandemic that will stay in my body for a very long time,” she said. Saks said.