They Aren’t Backing Down
The pandemic has dealt a massive blow to the country and world. Front-line health care workers from coast to coast have gone above and beyond the call of duty — pushing further in the face of fear than anyone can imagine. Many don’t consider themselves heroes — some even bristle at the word — but U.S. News is chronicling their experiences, along with their hopes, fears and the lessons they’re learning during this historic year. In the slides ahead you’ll meet a nurse who came out of retirement to work alongside her daughter, a physician treating patients in the hard-hit Navajo Nation and so many more. These are U.S. News Hospital Heroes.
Dr. Rana Awdish
A critical care doctor on the front lines at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit, Awdish prepared herself, her family and her team for the inevitable hit from the virus. And it hit hard. Drawing on her experience as a patient on a ventilator after her own life-threatening medical emergency in 2008, she found herself in a unique position to understand the fear, pain and loneliness that her patients with COVID-19 were feeling at a personal level. Read her entire story.
“Anticipating that kind of trauma will never protect you from it.”
Father Chris Ponnet
Father Ponnet’s work as director of spiritual care at LAC+USC Medical Center brings end-of-life peace to patients and to their families, especially during the coronavirus pandemic, when loved ones are unable to be present at the end. He does his best to make patients feel seen while cataloging as much as he can of his time to share with the patient’s family. He wears an N95 mask, goggles, a face shield and a disposable gown and gloves to minister to these patients. Read his entire story.
“My role is to be a bridge between the family and the patient,” Ponnet says. “I want to capture as much of what is happening in the room as possible, to report to the family.”
Esbeda Refugio
Making the choice to continue her work as a custodian at LAC+USC Medical Center in the midst of the novel coronavirus pandemic was not an easy one for Refugio. As a single mom of four children, she worried about bringing the virus home. However, her sense of duty to both the patients and the other hospital employees ultimately made the decision for her. Donning PPE, Refugio cleans two to three COVID rooms a shift, though she treats all rooms as if the patients were COVID-positive given the infectious nature of the disease. Read her entire story.
“It’s my responsibility to protect others, not only when it comes to patient care, but also the doctors, the nurses and the respiratory techs who go into the room,” she says. “I want everybody to be safe, so I clean to the best of my ability.”
Patrick O’Connor
O’Connor isn’t a doctor or nurse, but his role is no less essential. When the pandemic first landed at LAC+USC Medical Center, O’Connor, supervisor of the carpentry shop at the hospital, worked with his team to make adjustments to “intubation boxes” placed over patients who need a tube inserted to help them breathe. The original boxes didn’t provide enough coverage for doctors and nurses exposed to a patient’s infectious respiratory droplets as they performed the procedure. His team also built rooms for donning and doffing PPE in a safe environment. Read his entire story.
“We’re in the background, doing things to make things safer for the doctors, nurses and other health care workers and staffers,” he says. “That’s why we’re here.”
Dr. Josh Mugele
As New York City became the coronavirus epicenter, Mugele, an emergency medicine physician in Georgia, felt it was his duty to help in any way he could. This, for him, meant boarding a plane and heading straight into the line of fire, volunteering at one of the city’s hard-hit public hospitals. While there, he treated many patients, including one of the hospital’s own nurses who’d fallen ill with COVID-19. One of his goals was to learn as much as he could about how best to treat COVID-19, so he could bring those lessons back to his hometown hospital. By the time he returned to Georgia, cases were climbing sharply. Read his story.
“This is going to take a long time,” he says. “We’re going to have to change the way we live, the way we practice medicine and the way we make policies for years to come.”
Jody Mugele
Before Mugele’s husband, Dr. Josh Mugele, left to volunteer on the COVID-19 front lines in New York, the couple went through what they call the “death document.” A ritual they started before Dr. Mugele’s disaster medicine fellowship in Liberia in 2013 during the Ebola outbreak, the document contains anything she may need in the case of his death, along with letters he wrote to her and their two kids. He was gone for nearly a month before safely returning. Read her story.
“It really was the loneliest I think I’ve ever felt,” says Jody. “I was talking to the dogs like they’re my best friends.”
Jeanette Trella
Back in February, when calls started trickling into the Poison Control Call Center Trella manages at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she knew it was just the beginning. Her team is usually the first to hear about medical emergencies before they grow bigger. Sensing then that COVID-19 would pick up steam, she raced to launch the Greater Philadelphia Coronavirus Help Line, which has helped advise callers on everything from symptoms to economic woes tied to the pandemic. Read her entire story.
“We often get calls about dangerous trends right when they’re starting.”
Dr. Steven Brown
For 20 nights a month, Brown monitors as many as 100 patients a night virtually from a command station — now in his living room. A pulmonologist for Mercy Virtual Care Center, he helps on-the-ground clinicians like nurses and respiratory therapists care for patients with COVID-19, often in rural areas that need support and guidance. Through his screens he has made tough decisions and seen many people die — once, three in one hour. However, he is hopeful that once researchers discover more about the virus’ weak spots, a vaccine will be created. Read his story.
“If we listen to scientists, accept facts and make educated decisions based on the best available data, we will be able to drive down the number of cases of COVID-19.”
Mary Beth Patterson
Patterson thought she’d left her days as a nurse behind her when she retired over a year ago to move to New Hampshire. But when Stony Brook University Medical Center, her old stomping grounds and the same hospital where her daughter works as a nurse, started seeing an influx in COVID-positive patients, she made the decision to come out of retirement to help. Read her story.
“I just felt compelled to come back to work and be alongside my daughter during this pandemic.”
Kelly Patterson
When her mom made the decision to come out of retirement and return to nursing during the pandemic, Kelly Patterson was initially nervous. A young nurse at Stony Brook Medical Center, just a few years out of school, Patterson worried that her mom’s age would be a risk factor. During the height of the crisis, she was glad to have her mom’s knowledge of patient care and empathy — skills more important now than ever. Though they work opposite shifts — Kelly at night and her mom during the day — she stops by to see her at the beginning and end of each shift. Read Kelly’s entire story.
“You’re seeing death almost every shift,” Kelly says. “It’s not a soothing, comfortable death. They’re not accompanied by their loved ones, not able to see them or talk to them. It’s very sad.”
Felix Khusid
A veteran respiratory therapist at New York Presbyterian – Brooklyn Methodist, Khusid sees patients at the terrifying height of the disease, when “they feel like their lungs are filled with water.” His job then becomes to do whatever he can to help them stay alive, ideally without a ventilator. This sometimes includes high-flow therapy, which pushes concentrated levels of oxygen into the body and helps patients breathe on their own for longer. Read his entire story.
“During this epidemic, what was really emphasized — I think for the whole world — is the expert job that the respiratory therapists are doing,” he says. “It’s a profound responsibility that has profound consequences.”
Dr. Gregg Rosner
Rosner’s experience as a cardiac intensivist at New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center didn’t necessarily prepare him to treat patients with a disease that primarily attacks the lungs. However, when the pandemic struck his hospital, he stepped up to lead the COVID-19 intensive care unit. In the beginning, the ICU team faced many unknowns, including how best to wear PPE to protect themselves. Rosner set the tone for his new team. “I couldn’t be scared. I couldn’t be unsure,” he says. “We had a team with an impossible task and I was amazed at how everyone in the hospital stepped up.” Read his story.
“The coronavirus affected everyone — of all races and all ages; people who were sick before and people who weren’t sick before,” Rosner says.
Erica Harris
Erica Harris has been a nurse at NYC Health + Hospitals Elmhurst in Queens for 20 years, and she’s never seen anything like the novel coronavirus before. Harris leads the hospital’s COVID-19 testing tent — which, at opening hour, rarely sees lines of fewer than 15 to 20 people, mostly the working-class immigrants her hospital serves. The outdoor tent met the overwhelming need for increased testing and took teamwork to create the negative pressure rooms inside it that keep virus particles from flowing everywhere. Read her entire story.
“Once you faced the challenge — and the last two months have been a challenge — you feel stronger on the other side.”
Dr. Vonzella Bryant
One of Bryant’s first COVID-positive patients at Boston Medical Center came in with an oxygen level of 75% — far outside the normal range of 95% to 100%. In an effort to prevent intubation, Bryant, an emergency medicine physician, turned him over onto his stomach, a technique called proning. Luckily, the patient’s levels went back up to normal. Bryant and her family may have seen one of the earlier cases of the virus at home when her mother, who lives with the family, returned from vacation with telltale symptoms. After recovering and quarantining for 14 days, her mother now takes care of Bryant’s two kids, as Bryant juggles work on the front lines. Read her full story.
“At the hospital, we were being hit all at once with sick, agitated and sometimes combative patients; scared and nervous essential workers; staff with underlying conditions who were afraid of getting the virus; and we were fearful that we’d run out of ICU space.”
Dr. Yinan Lan
When coronavirus patients started flooding into NYC Health + Hospitals Bellevue, Lan, a primary care physician, knew from her already extensive work with the homeless population in the city that things would be even worse for those who lived in shelters or on the streets. Her team set up a system to keep track of patients and ensure they have a place to stay, enough food and medication, and are as healthy as possible especially during this time of uncertainty. Read her story.
“When there’s a will to do that, it takes everyone — not just a city agency, not just a few nonprofit organizations or hospitals.”
Bre Loughlin
One-half of the nursing duo that developed virtual coronavirus screening for the single women’s shelter at the Salvation Army Dane County in Madison, Wisconsin, Loughlin came up with the idea when she visited a men’s shelter and talked to workers. They described the challenges in screening guests for the virus, including the gap in knowledge of lay volunteers who weren’t equipped to properly screen for the disease. With the help of donated tablets, a Wi-Fi hotspot and volunteer nurses, the first virtual screening at the shelter began. Read Loughlin’s entire story.
“We had to think about at what point we would bring people into the trailer, maintain distancing, where we would place the PPE. All of that was part of the design of the screening we were able to pop up in 48 hours.”
Tracy Zvenyach
The other half of the nursing duo that developed virtual screening for homeless shelters in Madison, Wisconsin, Zvenyach has seen a lot of grateful people come through the testing centers, especially since the team makes it a priority to guarantee housing for the night no matter the outcome of the test. Read her entire story.
“One of the most daunting things about the pandemic is that, while we have our essential front-line workers, there’s this enormous secondary front line in the community.”
Dr. Dominic Carollo
Carollo, an anesthesiologist at Ochsner Medical Center in Louisiana, knows firsthand what his COVID-19 patients endure. Almost a week after he started working in the COVID intensive care ward, he developed a dry cough. He’d caught the virus. When his symptoms started to get scary, he relied on his medical training and buckled up for a one-on-one battle with COVID-19. “I put an IV in and I gave myself 2 liters of fluid,” he says. Almost two weeks later, his symptoms were gone and he went right back to treating patients. Read Carollo’s full story.
“Every COVID shift that I could work is one less exposure for one of my colleagues.”
Dr. Kyle Annen
In March, Annen, the medical director of transfusion services and patient blood management at Children’s Hospital Colorado, received a call about a critically ill adult patient with COVID-19, whose family urgently wanted their loved one to get a transfusion of convalescent plasma. They had heard that plasma from people who had recovered from COVID-19 may help. Other centers weren’t equipped to snap into action, so Annen’s team raced to launch a massive effort. In only a few weeks, they collected enough plasma donations for more than 150 patients. Read Annen’s entire story.
“I think people who had COVID want to help,” Annen says. “They feel it’s a way they can make a direct impact to help someone who had it worse than they did.”
Jessica Hawks
When the pandemic hit the U.S., the Pediatric Mental Health Institute at Children’s Hospital Colorado stopped offering in-person visits to prevent the spread of COVID-19. So Hawks, the clinical director of outpatient services, and her team pivoted to provide behavioral health care via telehealth to ensure kids with everything from eating disorders to depression didn’t experience a lapse in care. Though there were privacy concerns and technology barriers to contend with, Hawks and her teammates got the program up and running. Read her story.
“It was very clear that (telehealth services) was something we’d need to offer to our patients and their families during this stressful time.”
Pat Givens
As PPE shortages plague hospitals, Pat Givens, the chief nursing executive at Children’s Hospital Colorado, and her colleagues developed a system to track gear such as N95 masks and gowns. Their work ensured that even amidst a global shortage, the hospital would not run out of protective necessities. Read Givens’ entire story.
“Because of our early tracking and conservation measures, we never ran out. We’ve been able to sustain our PPE throughout the pandemic.”
Rubiela Guzman
Guzman heads up a team of 43 patient transporters at Mount Sinai Hospital. They’re charged with moving patients quickly and safely from place to place. When the pandemic engulfed New York City, their role turned somber: wheeling patients who didn’t survive COVID-19 onto refrigerated trucks when the morgue became full. Read Guzman’s entire story.
“The hardest part was just dealing with the overwhelming amount of patients that were passing away,” Guzman says. “And understanding that this was real. This is not a drill. This is not a movie,”
Jessica Montanaro
Montanaro, the assistant nursing coordinator at Mount Sinai Morningside, knew emergencies like the back of her hand after years working in the hospital’s medical-trauma intensive care unit. In March, however, the numbers of patients coming into her department were unlike anything she’d seen before. Still, she found herself uniquely prepared for COVID-19. For the past few years, her team has been perfecting the “proning” technique, now widely used to help COVID patients in serious respiratory distress. Read her story.
“What I was seeing, what I was experiencing, you couldn’t process it. You just had to keep moving.”
Christopher Wilkinson
When his manager in the bone marrow transplant unit came to Wilkinson and his colleagues to enlist them in a new program at Mount Sinai that would give gravely ill COVID-19 patients an experimental stem cell therapy, Wilkinson volunteered immediately. Though dangerous, the possibility of helping the sickest patients drew him in. The trial has shown early promise in COVID patients — Wilkinson is a member of the first team in the country to use this treatment. Read his entire story.
“Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, we have to be careful […] I felt like it was my duty to help.”
Dr. Joseph Herrera
Before COVID-19, he was a thriving sports medicine doctor. When confronted with the deadly virus, Herrera, chair of the department of rehabilitation at Mount Sinai Health System, and his department transitioned their unit into a 90-bed COVID care space. Herrera was nervous: He hadn’t worked a ventilator in almost 20 years. So, he spent every waking hour not at work studying everything he could to prepare for all the unknowns. The disease was fierce, taking the lives of many patients. He worries about the safety of his wife, an anesthesiologist on the front lines in New Jersey, and his medical residents, who were redeployed to hard-hit hospitals around the city. Read his entire story.
“It’s just heartbreaking to hear the fear and the exhaustion and the grieving they are going through.” He says: “Our young doctors. Our future.”
Dr. Jonathan Ramin
Ramin, a fourth-year physical rehabilitation and medicine resident at Mount Sinai, volunteered to redeploy at one of New York City’s hardest hit public hospitals. He had never experienced anything like the COVID-19 ICU. He cared for otherwise healthy people his own age and didn’t know if they would live or die. However, fear often leads to hope — Ramin has used his training to help rehabilitate patients recovering from the new disease. Read his full story.
“Sometimes, no matter what we did for these patients — no matter how young they were, no matter how healthy they were, they weren’t immune to this.”
Dr. Michael Bell
Bell, chief of critical care medicine at Children’s National, didn’t believe for a second that the novel coronavirus didn’t affect children, which was rumored in the early days. Since the pandemic began, he and his team have worked around the clock, treating more than 275 kids and young adults with COVID-19. When kids started coming to the hospital with symptoms of a new mystery syndrome seemingly linked to COVID-19, his team was ready. As multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C) continued to affect children, Bell worked with teams across the country and the world to discover more. Read his story.
“It’s important to talk to every hospital we can find every hour of the day so we can collaborate and share information with them. We need lots of people to keep looking at it, to keep reporting it basically in real time.”
Anna Stroman
When the pandemic hit Maryland, Anna Stroman, a chaplain with Doctors Community Hospital, immediately recognized a need to provide hospital employees with an outlet for stress. She created a virtual prayer line for stretched-thin front-line workers to call for a listening ear or uplifting prayer. Doctors and nurses also email in prayer requests for their seriously ill patients with COVID-19. With strict visitor restrictions in place, Stroman has found it difficult to not be able to comfort patients at their bedside. Read her full story.
“Just this whole season of not being able to personally go into a patient’s room and sit there and talk with them is difficult. Most times, patients just want you to listen.”
Diondre McBride
Though still a trainee through the Healthcare Chaplains Ministry Association, McBride is determined to pray over patients even if he’s swathed in PPE and behind a barrier. Although he cannot be at their bedside, he remains committed to providing peace and light to patients, their families and hospital staff during this unprecedented time. Read his full story.
“They asked me: Was I willing to put myself at risk to be chaplain during this COVID-19? I said, ‘This is what I do.’ And I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Dr. Stephen Kates
Running out of PPE, especially N95 masks, was one of the main issues that Kates and a committee of colleagues at VCU Health in Virginia set out to address when the virus hit their hospital. Kates, chair of orthopedic surgery, used his metalworking hobby to come up with a heavy duty metal shelf that would hold a high volume of masks to allow for mass disinfection with high-intensity ultraviolet light. The system has sterilized 20,000 masks, which means the hospital hasn’t run out of this necessary protective gear. Read his story.
“I’m happy to be able to help others with this,” he says. “That’s why I went into medicine, to help others.”
Dr. Neal Shipley
Soon after COVID-19 flooded New York City — closing many doctor’s offices — Shipley, medical director of 52 Northwell Health-GoHealth Clinics, saw an influx of patients with fevers, upper respiratory distress and fatigue. In response, he and his staff developed a system for knowing when to send patients home, when to treat them and when to send them to the emergency room. In the first two months of the pandemic, a third of the approximately 20,000 patients coming into the urgent care centers tested positive for COVID-19. Shipley’s urgent care centers are seeing high demand for both virus and antibody testing. Read his story.
“When there’s a second wave, if we don’t have a better strategy for testing and contact tracing, I worry that all of the sacrifice will be for naught and we will be right back where we started.”
Rev. Kris Pikaart
Rev. Kris Pikaart, a hospital chaplain in Gallup, New Mexico, has “never worked harder” than during her hours and days spent in the COVID unit. Many of the hospital’s patients are residents of the Navajo Nation — a community that’s been hit hard by the virus, largely due to the widespread lack of running water and other resources. Pikaart, who has only taken a few days off since March, offers comfort to patients and their families, doing what she can to make this unprecedented time less “awful and lonely.” Read her entire story.
“I have a goal that nobody here dies alone, ever,” Pikaart says. “I can’t always make that happen because this disease is funny and it’s not always predictable how deaths from the disease are — sometimes they happen so quickly.”
Ashley Holsman
Hoslman, a labor and delivery nurse at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, was one of the first to raise her hand when volunteers were needed in the COVID-19 ICU. Though she has no experience with infectious diseases, she wanted to step up for patients — and for her co-workers with family members to protect, since she lives alone. Read Hoslman’s entire story.
“As a nurse in women and baby and the NICU, you can never predict what’s going to walk through the door, and you fly by the seat of your pants,” she says. “And that’s the case now in the COVID ICU.”
Jayme Menier
When Menier, clinical leader of the inpatient speech pathology team at MedStar Georgetown, realized that the U.S. would soon see the same levels of coronavirus patients as the rest of the world, she knew that she, as a speech-language pathologist, would be helping on the front lines. Since she started rehabilitating COVID-19 patients, she has quarantined herself away from her elderly parents, sister and nieces, and worries about giving the virus to her husband and daughters. Read her entire story.
“I felt a myriad of emotions, mostly fear of the unknown. As evidence-based practitioners, the lack of evidence (about the novel coronavirus) was daunting.”
Angela Baker
Baker, an inpatient speech pathologist at MedStar Georgetown, and her team split their time between COVID-19 patients and treating other, non-COVID patients. She relies on her fellow speech pathologists for emotional support. They share wins, losses and treatment tips. Read Baker’s entire story.
“We’re constantly reminding patients of where they are and why they are there.”
Brittany Godin
Godin, a speech pathologist at MedStar Georgetown, helps patients who have gotten through the worst of the virus and are on their way to rehabilitation. She assists those who have been intubated as they speak again for the first time in weeks, and treats trouble swallowing or chewing. Read her entire story.
“By the time we see COVID-19 patients, they’ve overcome many hurdles. It’s time for them to eat, it’s time to talk, it’s time to get better. It’s like, ‘Yay, you’ve made it to the other side.'”
Dr. Leana Wen
Wen has been a visible, outspoken advocate for public health during the entirety of the pandemic — even after just giving birth. But when human rights protests erupted across the country and the world in response to the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, she began to speak out in response to dual public health crises: the coronavirus and systemic racism — and how they feed each other. Read Wen’s entire story.
“We should point out and speak clearly about how racism is not only a public health issue, but a public health crisis,” she says. “These systemic inequities and institutional racism are also intricately, inextricably intertwined with COVID-19.”
Reagan Boomer
When Boomer and her colleague Lori Holleman, both maternity nurses at Sentara Princess Anne Hospital in Virginia Beach, heard about a couple who were worried about masks preventing the hearing-impaired father from being able to lip-read during the birth of their first child, the duo decided to create clear masks, using plastic page protectors and sewing skills. Read her entire story.
“We’re used to wearing masks for different procedures, but to go to masking at all times … has been quite a transition.”
Lori Holleman
When the need for a see-through mask arose, Holleman — who, in addition to being a maternity nurse, is a skilled seamstress — quickly whipped up a solution. When the father-to-be saw it, he started to cry, floored by the staff’s kindness. Read Holleman’s full story.
“We had no idea how big an impact it was going to make for them. It was something simple we could do to make their experience better.”
Dr. Eileen Barrett
Barrett is an internal medicine physician at a hospital in New Mexico, and many of his patients are members of the Navajo Nation — a community hit harder by the virus than even New York or New Jersey. The staggering numbers are likely due to socioeconomic factors like a lack of running water in many homes and multiple generations living under one roof. Read Barrett’s entire story.
“I’m really talking about it very calmly, but this is not how I feel about it. I’m so angry about structural inequality and structural racism.”
Jessica Peck
A pediatric nurse practitioner and clinical professor at Baylor University Louise Herrington School of Nursing in Dallas, Texas, Peck is no stranger to medical conspiracy theories. But when falsehoods and half-truths about the coronavirus started seeping into her exam room, it became even more difficult to cut through the noise and get the truth out to parents. She teaches her nursing students, many of whom were sent out into the field for the first time during the pandemic, how to combat misinformation. Read her entire story.
“As nurses, I think it’s going to take our collective effort to fearlessly do whatever it takes to help the world recover from this pandemic.”
Dr. Steven Siegel
When COVID-19 arrived in the U.S., Siegel, a psychiatrist at Keck Medicine of University of Southern California, immediately recognized the need for mental health support among front-line health care workers. His “Care for the Caregivers” program provides virtual sessions like group therapy, anonymous talk therapy and psychiatric treatment. It also secures housing for hospital staff who have to quarantine apart from their families. Read Siegel’s full story.
“At any given time, three of our faculty members are staffing a line or doing group outreach (sessions).”
Patrick Naughton
As the team lead for environmental services at Geisinger Medical Center in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Naughton, 29, is responsible for keeping the 293-bed hospital clean. It’s a difficult task even under normal circumstances, and it’s become more challenging amid the coronavirus pandemic. Many members of Naughton’s nearly 50-person team were initially scared of contracting the virus, but they stepped up despite those fears. Read Naughton’s entire story.
“This is probably the biggest assignment I’ll ever see. Me and my staff are part of something major.”
Dr. Mitchell Li
When human rights protests started to bubble up in response to George Floyd’s murder, Li, an emergency room doctor, organized three makeshift medical tents for the 35,000 people who marched in Chicago on June 6. He treated one woman who had sustained an open arm fracture during a fall; others were dehydrated or had minor cuts and bruises. Though the threat of contracting COVID-19 was high, Li knew he wanted to help the peaceful protestors in some way. When he learned about the need for medical volunteers, he didn’t think twice. Read his story
“This is a marathon and not a sprint. We can’t just high-five and be done,” he says. “A crisis is an excellent opportunity for reform, both within society at large and within our broken medical system.”
Darlene Hightower
Back in April, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot appointed Hightower, associate vice president of community health equity at Rush University Medical Center, to the city’s Racial Equity Rapid Response Team. The team’s main goal is to reduce the disproportionate number of deaths from COVID-19 among Chicago’s Black population. Systemic inequality, she says, is a pre-existing condition. Read Hightower’s entire story.
“Poverty is what’s really killing people.”
Lauren Gardner
In January, Gardner, a 35-year-old civil engineer, and a few of her students at Johns Hopkins University came up with an idea to track the virus’ spread. She never expected they map they created to evolve into the world’s most famous coronavirus tracker, used by researchers, hospitals and journalists across the globe. At first, the team compiled data by hand. Now, the system is automated and pulls from databases worldwide to accurately track the number of cases and deaths. Read Gardner’s entire story.
“I have a feeling that these kinds of tools and information will now forever be provided, because there’s obviously such a demand for it.”
Dr. Juanita Mora
After Mora went on Univision, a Spanish-language television network, to discuss the virus’ risks to those with upper respiratory issues, the phone at her Chicago-based clinic rang relentlessly. Since then, Mora, an allergist, has provided antibody tests to more than 2,500 people. Many of her patients work in industries deemed essential — grocery stores, tortilla factories and the meatpacking industry — and asked her to speak with their employers about workplace safety during the pandemic. Even as many other businesses shuttered, her practice never closed. She ensured all her patients who needed allergy shots or inhalers that they would not be left behind. Read her story.
“I have a lot of little kids and adults with asthma. I didn’t want to leave them without medical care in the midst of a respiratory pandemic. We wanted to be there for our patients and be in the fight.”
David Vincent
As the coronavirus pandemic crippled hospitals nationwide, Vincent, an architect, and his team at HKS Design Firm in Dallas started fielding calls from facilities in dire need of quick ways to expand their treatment capacity while keeping patients and staff protected from the virus. Vincent’s projects have included turning a convention center in Detroit into a field hospital, transitioning unused space at hospitals into COVID-19 treatment units and repurposing vacant quarters in a Maryland prison into space for hospital beds. Read his entire story.
“If health care systems and the government won’t fund what is needed, what will we do when the next global health crisis rears its head?”
Dr. Peter Hotez
Hotez, a professor and co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, has spent his time in quarantine on two projects: developing a vaccine and educating the public about the virus via media appearances. He and his work have been referenced in more than 9,800 articles, and he’s been a vocal fixture on cable news networks. Hotez and his team are determined to ensure that potential vaccines are affordable for everyone and available worldwide. Read his story.
“I speak to people who don’t want to wear masks the same way as I do to parents who don’t want to vaccinate their kids.”
Cianna Boardman
When Boardman’s ICU at CHI Health Good Samaritan in Kearney, Nebraska, started seeing COVID-19 patients, her job as an ICU nurse shot from stressful to scary. She was used to caring for severely ill patients, but the virus’ contagious nature was particularly worrisome. Boardman, who’s 24, takes issue with those who are her age or younger and have been cavalier about their health during the pandemic. Read her entire story.
“I wish young people would take it more seriously. I think if people my age saw what we see, we wouldn’t see as much selfish behavior. Although it may not affect you, it may affect a family member or someone else who’s vulnerable.”
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Fear, Courage, Grit: Meet More Than 50 ‘Hospital Heroes’ originally appeared on usnews.com
