After finishing her shift, Katherina Faustino waits for other intensive care nurses at the Nevada hospital where they work. They do not leave immediately. “Let’s go to the chapel,” he said. “Let’s pray.”
Faustino has been moved by the large number of deaths from Covid-19 that has been witnessed in recent months as Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican, the Siena campus faced a flood of patients who filled the ICU beds for weeks.
“If it wasn’t religious, it probably is now,” he said.
The longest and deadliest rise in the pandemic may be approaching a national plan, but the growing flood of new cases and hospitalizations for months and months continues to grow in some parts of the US. The crisis has imposed nurses and doctors to a degree they have never experienced. The large number of deaths and the physical and emotional demands at work have left them exhausted and sometimes feel desperate, they said.
The increase has ravaged the country since late September. In interviews in recent months, doctors and nurses from several affected states, including California and Nevada, where hospitalizations remain high, said their jobs and lives were disrupted in small and large ways by the flood of patients. critics and the I will not survive. “Despair is incredible,” Silvia Perez-Protto, a physician and medical director at the Cleveland Clinic Center for End of Life Care, based in Ohio, said in December, the month Covid-19 hospitalizations peaked. moment.