Dozens of times a day in Covid-19 wards across California, a scene like this unfolds: a hospital chaplain watches while a death is announced by a machine.
Kristin Michealsen, a chaplain at a hospital in Los Angeles, stood beside a man’s bed, holding his hand. His relatives gathered at his home just minutes from the hospital – they were not allowed to enter the hospital ward. The patient’s heart had stopped. Mrs. Michealsen, an ordained minister, watched a computer monitor as she accompanied the man to the end of his life. Eighty beats per minute. Sixty. Forty.
California had an average of 433 daily deaths last week. On Tuesday, it became the state with the highest total toll, surpassing New York.
In the depersonalized math of the pandemic, there are two ways to see the devastation of the virus in California. As the most populous state in the United States, it is by far the largest number of cases in the country – more than 3.4 million – and now the highest number of deaths. But when adjusted for its large population, California has a lower death rate than 31 states and Washington, DC
With about 114 deaths per 100,000 people, the state has about half the rate in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts or Mississippi. The disparity between New York and California may be even greater when one considers the likelihood that New York would count fewer deaths in the early frantic stages of the pandemic because virus testing was very limited.
However, these mitigating statistics mean little to the families of the more than 44,900 people killed by the virus in California. Nor do the numbers mean much to chaplains like Michealsen, who on that January day, when the photo was taken by an Associated Press photographer, had already seen the deaths of two other patients. 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 come to this world, we are immediately surrounded by people – we have a human touch,” said Michealsen last week at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Los Angeles. “I just think that when we leave this world, we should have the same.”
The pandemic has had an uneven impact in California, with people in the south and the central agricultural valley far more affected than those in the north.
In San Francisco, where nearly 350 people died of the virus, the cruelty of the pandemic – the families’ inability to surround their dying relatives, the interruption of old mourning rituals – is exhausting.
“I have never, in 15 years, experienced the multiple layers of loss we are experiencing now,” said Naomi Tzril Saks, chaplain at the University of California, San Francisco medical center. As chaplains across the country, Ms. Saks and her colleagues have been doing what they can to remedy the cruel isolation of the disease.
“We expanded bands and people playing the violin,” said Saks. “We saw the son of a person who was incarcerated and he hadn’t seen him in years before he died.”
Chaplains have been doing virtual retreats to avoid emotional exhaustion, Saks said. Some joined national support groups.
“There are stories and experiences of this pandemic that will remain in my body for a long time,” said Saks.