ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Wednesday’s briefing by the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force was the organization’s last of 2020, and featured compelling and heartbreaking testimony from a woman on the proverbial front lines in the battle against COVID-19.
Natalie Crawford, an ICU nurse at SSM Health St. Joseph Hospital in Lake St. Louis, described in painful detail what happens when patients come into the hospital, and the decisions being forced upon a patient’s family, plus the impact on staff themselves.
“Their families struggle with how patients come in with shortness of breath…..and end up dying,” she said. “Our job is getting harder and harder, we’re getting stretched thinner and thinner.”
“It’s hard to see death after death after death,” Crawford added. Of the daily counts that are broadcast daily, Crawford said she fears the public has become numb.
“I just want so badly for the public and anyone that has any position in this at all to remember these numbers….they are people, they are people that have meaning, they still have meaning even though they passed. They had purpose, they had life, they had love, they had family, and now they are gone, stripped of it all because of a virus.”