Melissa Bailey, Kaiser Health News and Alastair Gee, The Guardian and Christina Jewett and Ankita Rao, The Guardian and Danielle Renwick, The Guardian and Sarah Varney, Kaiser Health News April 24, 2020
America’s health care workers are dying. In some states, medical staff account for as many as 20% of known coronavirus cases. They tend to patients in hospitals, treating them, serving them food and cleaning their rooms. Others at risk work in nursing homes or are employed as home health aides.
Some of them do not survive the encounter. Many hospitals are overwhelmed and some workers lack protective equipment or suffer from underlying health conditions that make them vulnerable to the highly infectious virus.
Many cases are shrouded in secrecy. “Lost on the Frontline” is an ongoing project by Kaiser Health News and The Guardian that aims to document the lives of health care workers in the U.S. who died from COVID 19, and to investigate why so many are victims of the disease.
These are some of the first tragic cases.
Surgical Technician Made Friends Everywhere She Went
(Courtesy of Jorge Casarez)
Monica Echeverri Casarez
Age: 49Occupation: Surgical technicianPlace of Work: Detroit Medical Center Harper University Hospital in DetroitDate of Death: April 11, 2020
Soon after, Echeverri Casarez and Casarez began feeling ill. Quarantined together, Echeverri Casarez tried to make the best of the situation. She baked her husband a cake — chocolate with white frosting. She died a few days later.
Dela Cruz was a geriatric psychiatrist and didn’t work in coronavirus wards. But he continued to see patients in person. In early April, Dela Cruz, who lived alone, complained only of migraines, his friends said. Within a week, his condition worsened, and he was put on a ventilator at a nearby hospital. He died soon after.
Friends said he may have been exposed at the hospital. (In a statement, hospital representatives said he didn’t treat COVID-19 patients.)
Dela Cruz, the oldest of 10 siblings, came from a family of health care professionals. His friends and family — from Cebu, Philippines, to Teaneck, New Jersey — remembered his jovial personality on Facebook. He won “best doctor of the year” awards, played tennis and cooked traditional Cebu dishes.
Nida Gonzales, a colleague, said he always supported people, whether funding a student’s education or running a church mental health program. “I feel like I lost a brother,” she said.
Her niece April Amada lives in Accad’s hometown. She remembers her aunt as a generous cook: A visit from Tita Debbie (Aunt Debbie) meant unli-kainan, or “unlimited food”: She served up big American breakfasts, cooked spicy kielbasa with cabbage and introduced her family to Jell-O.
Accad was the “pillar of the family,” Amada said, improving their quality of life by sending home money, and even supporting her younger sister through nursing school.
Amada said her aunt first signaled she was sick on the evening of March 16, telling relatives she had a fever and loose stool. On March 19, she reported feeling better by taking Tylenol. But the following day, she was hospitalized with pneumonia, a complication of COVID-19. She told her family in the Philippines that she had tested positive for the disease caused by the coronavirus and asked them to pray for her and to spread the word to local pastors, Amada said.
Amada, who is also a nurse, said her family felt helpless watching their beloved matriarch suffer from afar, and being unable to travel to her bedside because of the infectious nature of the disease. They last saw her face on a video call.
Mark Accad, 36, who lives across the street from his parents, said his mother had diabetes, a risk factor for serious complications from COVID-19. In her last phone call with him, he said, she was preoccupied with her family’s health more than her own. But he could hear in her voice that she was worried.
“It’s just terrible that we all couldn’t be there for her,” he said.
Mark Accad said he believes his mother was exposed by infected co-workers, though that hasn’t been confirmed. She was a nursing supervisor who often stepped in to care for patients, he said.
The Department of Veterans Affairs is facing serious shortages in protective equipment for its health care workers, according to internal memos obtained by The Wall Street Journal. Mark Accad said he doesn’t know whether his mother had adequate protective gear.
In a statement, the Detroit VA Medical Center declined to comment on Accad’s case, citing privacy concerns, but confirmed that an employee of her age died from coronavirus complications.
The VA has “implemented appropriate measures to ensure the safest health care environment for each Veteran, visitor and employee,” including immediately isolating patients known to be at risk for a COVID-19 infection. As of Monday, nine VA health care workers systemwide had died of COVID-19 complications, and over 1,500 were being quarantined because of coronavirus infections, according to VA spokesperson Christina Noel.
Mark Accad said he would like his mother’s story to raise awareness of the risks health care workers face in the global pandemic.
“It’s pretty devastating. It’s surreal. Reno’s not that big of a city,” said Robyn Underhill, a night nurse who worked with Thompson in the ER at Reno’s VA hospital the past two years.
Thompson, who dreamed of teaching nursing one day, died April 7, joining a growing list of health care professionals killed in the pandemic.
Born Vianna Fye in Port Huron, Michigan, she became a go-getter nurse who worked almost exclusively at night, putting in five or six 12-hour shifts a week, according to her husband, Bob Thompson, 60.
The couple met in 1991 on the Osan Air Base in South Korea, where he was an inventory management specialist in the Air Force, and she was a veterinary technician in the Army, caring for military police dogs. They bonded over two-step dancing and country music.
Vianna was a “proud momma,” often showing off photos and videos of their three sons on her phone, her husband said. As the main breadwinner for over eight years, she juggled two jobs to make sure her boys had everything they needed, including saxophones, drums and keyboards so they could play jazz and country music. “She was just sweet, big-hearted, caring, unselfish,” he said.
Before she died, Thompson was working two jobs: full time in the ER at the VA Sierra Nevada Health Care System in Reno, and part time in the ICU at Northern Nevada Medical Center.
In the ICU, she tended to a fellow VA health care worker who had fallen ill with COVID-19, according to nurse Underhill. Two days later, on March 29, Thompson arrived at work with a cough.
“She came to work sick, and we were all very concerned,” Underhill said. “Call it intuition, call it ‘Spidey sense,’ but I knew that moment that she was coughing that this was not going to end well.”
Underhill said Thompson already had a slight smoker’s cough, so she may have overlooked the fact that her cough was a classic symptom of COVID-19.
“She was in denial that she was taking care of this high-risk population,” Underhill said. And she was reluctant to miss work.
That Sunday shift would be Thompson’s last. Over the next four days, she wrestled with fever, weakness and shortness of breath. The following Thursday, she texted her husband from the bedroom: “Call the ambulance, I can hardly breathe.”
She was taken to the VA hospital where she worked and immediately sedated and put on a ventilator.
The next Tuesday, her organs were failing and it was time to remove life support, her husband said. They connected him on FaceTime to say goodbye, and a nurse held her hand as she died.
As a veteran, she qualified for an “honor flight,” in which the patient’s body is covered with a black box, draped with an American flag and wheeled through the hospital while others line up and salute.
Because of the infectious nature of the coronavirus, a flag could not be safely draped over her body, so someone walked in front of her with a flag.
Bob Thompson said the honor flight ceremony drew more people into the hallways than staff had seen in 20 years, “all the way from the ICU to the morgue.”
This story is part of “Lost on the Frontline,” a project from The Guardian and Kaiser Health News that aims to document the life of every health care worker in America who dies from COVID-19 during the pandemic. If you have a colleague or loved one we should include, please share their story.
Jon Ross Myers is the executive editor and publisher of the Mississippi News Network, Mississippi's largest digital only media company. He can be reached at editor@tippahnews.com
