AP PHOTOS: For Calif. COVID nurses, past and present collide

AP PHOTOS: For Calif. COVID nurses, past and present collide

SeattlePI.com

Published

In early 2020, when the coronavirus began making it difficult for many people around the world to breathe, hospitals became a central front against a disease that, more than a year later, has killed nearly 4 million human beings and counting.

At one hospital in Mission Viejo, Calif., a team of nurses and doctors were recruited for what became the Isolation Intensive Care Unit. Many volunteers at Providence Mission Hospital had come from cardiac and surgical intensive care units, where they deal with death and trauma each day.

Launched in March 2020, the isolation unit would come to be known as “Tip of the Spear,” a military term used to describe a group doing dangerous work. Many nurses who would spend countless hours with patients, helping them return to health or helping them say goodbye to family, got tattooed with spears, hash marks and a heart.

Today, those nurses speak of forming deep bonds and of the joy in helping some deathly sick patients survive. But they also can’t forget horrific and heart-breaking experiences that are very much still with them, even months after the hospital’s special unit shut down as cases in California dropped sharply.

With little knowledge of how to treat patients, and amid enormous personal risks, these nurses had leaped into the abyss. They will never be the same.

To capture the reality that the horrors of COVID-19 will be with us for years to come, even as many countries move beyond the pandemic, Associated Press photojournalist Jae C. Hong turned to an unusual form of photography not typically used in the context of reporting the news. He employed a special exposure technique in photographing 10 nurses in areas of the isolation unit, now empty.

First, Hong made pictures of each nurse. Then he asked them to step aside and shot...

Full Article