After finishing her shift, Katherina Faustino is waiting for other nurses in the intensive care unit at the Nevada hospital where they work. They don’t leave immediately. “We’re going to the chapel,” she said. “We pray.”
Ms Faustino is shocked by the sheer number of Covid-19 deaths she has witnessed in recent months as Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican, Siena Campus faced a flood of patients filling IC beds for weeks.
“If you weren’t religious, you probably are now,” she said.
The longest and deadliest rise in the pandemic may be nearing a plateau nationally, but the soaring, months-long spate of new cases and hospitalizations is still on the way in some parts of the US. they have never experienced. The high death toll and the physical and emotional demands at work leave them exhausted and sometimes feel hopeless, they said.
The wave has engulfed the country since the end of September. In interviews over the past months, doctors and nurses in several severely affected states – including California and Nevada, where hospital admissions remain high – said their work and lives had been changed in ways big and small by the flow of critically ill patients and the many who did not. don’t survive. “The despair is unbelievable,” said Silvia Perez-Protto, a physician and medical director at the Ohio-based Cleveland Clinic Center for End of Life Care, in December, the month Covid-19 hospital admissions peaked in that state.