After her shift, Katherina Faustino is waiting for other intensive care nurses at the hospital in Nevada where they work. They do not leave immediately. “We’re going to the chapel,” she said. “We pray.”
Ms Faustino has been shaken by the large number of Covid-19 deaths she has suffered in recent months as Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican, Siena campus faced a flood of patients filling its ICU beds for weeks.
“If you were not religious, you probably are now,” she said.
The longest and deadliest rise of the pandemic may be approaching a plateau nationally, but the rising, month-long flood of new cases and hospitalizations is still brewing in some parts of the US. Throughout the crisis, nurses and doctors have taxed to some extent. they have never experienced. The high death toll and the physical and emotional demands at work made them feel exhausted and sometimes hopeless, they said.
The boom has swept the country since late September. In recent interviews, doctors and nurses in several severely afflicted states, including California and Nevada, where hospitalizations remain high, have said that their jobs and lives have been changed in large and small ways by the flood of critically ill patients and the many who have not. do not have. not survive. “The despair is incredible,” said Silvia Perez-Protto, a physician and medical director at the Cleveland Clinic Center for End of Life Care in Ohio, in December, the month in which Covid-19 hospitalizations peaked.