Want to honor COVID’s healthcare heroes? Skip the pizza, and get a vaccine | Editorial
We’ve talked a lot during this pandemic about the sacrifices of frontline medical workers. We’ve called them “heroes” and put up yard signs. We’ve picked up the tab for pizza delivery to the ER. We’ve applauded them at the end of another tough shift.
But pizza and yard signs and gratitude are hollow if they don’t include action — personal action. To really honor healthcare workers, mask up when appropriate, get a vaccine and quit denying that COVID-19 is a deadly disease. Otherwise, you’re endangering the very workers you’re calling heroes.
A five-part Miami Herald/McClatchy documentary, Inside the COVID Unit: Battling the Coronavirus Pandemic in Miami, makes that point vividly. The series shows viewers what went on behind the doors of the ICU at Jackson South Medical Center in Miami-Dade County in the months after COVID-19 forced hospitals to close to visitors last spring. The documentary, filmed by Miami Herald/McClatchy visual journalist Reshma Kirpalani and by Jackson South medical workers themselves, offers an unvarnished look at the daily lives of doctors and nurses as they fought to save patients during the pandemic: their worries about catching or spreading COVID; the mental toll of fighting a disease with few weapons; the agony of being isolated from family so they could tend to strangers.
The series focuses on a doctor, a nurse and a Miami-Dade woman who lost both her husband and son to COVID. But it tells a larger story, too, of healthcare workers everywhere who showed us what courage looked like each time they pulled on protective gear and went to work. “Inside the COVID Unit” captures the immense stress of a job — healthcare worker in a worldwide pandemic — that no one signed up for.
One of the most gripping moments comes in Episode 5, when Dr. Andrew Pastewski, the ICU medical director at Jackson South, chokes back his own emotions as he tells another family the bad news. It should be required viewing for anyone who has ever denied COVID’s seriousness or rejected getting the vaccine.
He records his thoughts on his phone: “Begging me to keep fighting, to keep trying. Just thanking me. I hate when people thank me when I don’t end up getting the result I want. Promising to come, when this is all over, and give me a hug ... I didn’t anticipate the heaviness of this. How personal a lot of these cases would be.”
The series also highlights Dianne Washington, who is devastated by the losses of both her son, Derrick Benard Sharpley, and her husband, Kenneth Washington, to the virus. Both were hospitalized at Jackson South.
“This is sounding the alarm,” she said. “Put that mask on, and do your part. I can’t help my husband and my son, but I can certainly tell the people in America straighten up and look out for each other and stop this foolishness. ... God spared me for this day to say that.”
The dedication of healthcare workers in the documentary is remarkable. Julio Valido, a registered nurse, started working with COVID patients as soon as they started coming in the hospital door. He’s 32 and knew the virus would be harder on older nurses if they contracted it.
Yet he insisted that, “There’s nothing special about it. You come to my hospital. You come to my ICU and you’re sick? I’m going to do what it takes to help you out. Even if it means risking my own life.”
Healthcare workers don’t want to be heroes. They don’t need more pizza. They just want people to stop getting the virus. For Valido and Pastewski and Washington — and everyone else standing in their shoes — get the vaccine.
Join us at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, April 29 for a virtual conversation with the documentary’s participants.They will discuss what it was like having their work and personal lives amid COVID captured on video. Read more about the event here. RSVP here to join us.
This story was originally published April 28, 2021 at 12:46 PM.