ON THE FRONT LINES

ACTS OF COURAGE AND KINDNESS IN THE AGE OF CORONAVIRUS

- MAX WEISS, RON CASSIE, KEN IGLEHART, JANE MARION, AND LYDIA WOOLEVER WITH LAUREN COHEN AND GRACE HEBRON

A State of Dis-Ease.

AS THE CORONAVIRUS CONTINUES ITS DEADLY SPREAD, MARYLANDERS ON THE FRONT LINES RISK THEIR OWN HEALTH TO HELP OTHERS.

BY RON CASSIE

ON THE WEEK OF St. Patrick’s Day, the Johns Hopkins Hospital intensive care unit where veteran nurse Kathleen Bailey works was silent and empty. Over several shifts, each patient in the two-dozen-bed unit had been moved to another ICU section on the East Baltimore campus. Bailey’s floor had been cleared as a precaution against a potential influx of COVID-19 patients, the first of whom from Maryland were just being diagnosed at associated Hopkins hospitals in Bethesda and Washington, where the capital region’s outbreak was in its alarming, beginning stages. “Within 24 to 48 hours, we were full,” she says. “Patients were arriving by ambulance and helicopter already intubated.”

Months later, Bailey’s unit remains full, and is still eerily quiet. Normally, the ICU’s private rooms and waiting area bustle with concerned parents, adult children, and siblings. Now, with visitation prohibited, families see their sick loved ones via iPads, placed on the bedside tables. With many of the infected heavily sedated, family members are left to simply stare at their unconscious loved ones, hooked to cumbersome breathing masks, as they pray for the best. “One family asked if we can stream 24 hours a day,” Bailey says. “Just watching them breathe, even with the help of a machine, provides so much solace.”