After finishing her shift, Katherina Faustino is waiting for other intensive care assistants at the Nevada hospital where she works. Don’t leave right away. “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 witnessed in recent months as Dignity Health-St. Rose Dominican, Siena Campus has faced an influx of patients who have been filling their intensive care beds for weeks.
“If you weren’t religious, you probably are now,” she said.
The longest and deadliest rise in the pandemic could approach a national plateau, but months of rising floods, new cases and hospitalizations are still rising in parts of the United States. they have never experienced. The high death toll and physical and emotional demands at work have left them exhausted and sometimes feel hopeless, they said.
Growth has swept the country since late September. In interviews in recent months, doctors and nurses in several severely affected states – including California and Nevada, where hospitalizations remain high – said their work and lives had been altered in large and small ways by the flood of critically ill patients and by many who do not survive. “Despair is incredible,” Silvia Perez-Protto, a physician and medical director at the Cleveland Clinical Center for End-of-Life Care in Ohio, said in December, the month Covid-19 hospitalization peaked in that state.