After finishing her shift, Katherina Faustino waits for other intensive care nurses at the Nevada hospital where they work. They don’t leave immediately. “Let’s go to the chapel,” she said. “We pray.”
Mrs. Faustino was shaken by the large number of deaths from Covid-19 that she witnessed in recent months as Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican, Siena Campus faced a flood of patients who filled their ICU beds for weeks.
“If you weren’t religious, it probably is now,” she said.
The longest and deadliest outbreak of the pandemic may be approaching a plateau nationally, but the growing flood of months of new cases and hospitalizations is still peaking in some parts of the United States, the crisis has burdened nurses and doctors to a degree that many said they never experienced it. The high number of deaths and the physical and emotional demands at work have left them exhausted and sometimes without hope, they said.
The increase has swept the country since the end of September. In interviews over the past few months, doctors and nurses in several hard-hit states – including California and Nevada, where hospitalizations remain high – said their work and lives have been changed in large and small ways by the flood of critically ill patients and many who have not. they did not survive. “The desperation 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 when Covid-19 hospitalizations peaked in that state .