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Dozens of times a day in Covid-19 neighborhoods across California, a scene like this unfolds: A hospital chaplain watches a machine-announced death.
Kristin Michealsen, chaplain at the Los Angeles Hospital, stood at a man’s bedside, holding his hand. His relatives gathered at their home minutes from the hospital – they were not allowed to enter the hospital ward. The patient’s heart had just stopped. Ms Michealsen, an ordained minister, had watched a computer screen as she accompanied the man on the brink of his life. Eighty beats per minute. Sixty. Forty.
California has recorded an average of 433 daily deaths over the past week. On Tuesday, it became the state with the highest number of coronavirus deaths overall, overtaking New York.
In the depersonalized mathematics of the pandemic, there are two ways of looking at the ravages of the virus in California. As America’s most populous state, California has by far the most cases in the country – more than 3.4 million – and now the most deaths. But when adjusted for its large population, California has a lower death rate than 31 states and Washington DC.
With about 114 deaths per 100,000 population, the state has about half the rate of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts or Mississippi. The disparity between New York and California could be even greater if you factor in the likelihood that New York will undercount deaths in the frenzied early stages of the pandemic because viral testing was so limited.
Still, those mitigating statistics mean little to the families of the more than 44,900 people killed by the virus in California. The numbers don’t mean much to chaplains like Ms Michealsen, either, who on that January day, when the photo was taken by an Associated Press photographer, had already seen two other patients die. Often times, she is the only other person in the room when death occurs. Sometimes a nurse holds the other hand of the dying patient.
“When we come into this world, we are immediately surrounded by people – we have a human touch,” Ms. Michealsen of Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in the Mission Hills section of Los Angeles said last week. “I just think when we leave this world, we should have the same.”
The pandemic has taken uneven havoc across California, with people in the southerly and central agricultural valley hit much harder than those in the north.
But even in San Francisco, where nearly 350 people have died from the virus, the cruelty of the pandemic – the inability of families to surround their dying loved ones, the interruption of age-old mourning rituals – is wearing.
“In 15 years, I have never experienced the multiple layers of loss that we are now experiencing,” said Naomi Tzril Saks, chaplain at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center in Parnassus Heights. Like chaplains across the country, Ms. Saks and her colleagues did what they could to address the cruel isolation of the disease.
“We zoomed in on the groups and people playing the violin,” Ms. Saks said. “We zoomed in on the son of an incarcerated person, and she hadn’t seen him for years before she died.
The chaplains have participated in virtual retreats to avoid emotional exhaustion, Ms. Saks said. Some have joined national support groups.
“There are stories and experiences of this pandemic that will stay in my body for a very long time,” Ms. Saks said.
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