It’s been about five years and more than 1.2 million American deaths since COVID-19 started killing people, but the frenzy of those early pandemic days remains memorable.
Consider this 10-hour window of March 11, 2020, the day that, in many ways, kicked off the era:
In the morning, East Coast time, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, told Congress that the already lightning-quick spread of COVID-19 was “going to get worse.” About 90 minutes later, word spread that the World Health Organization was decreeing the virus to be a worldwide pandemic. By evening, the National Basketball Association temporarily suspended the 2019-20 season, sending people home from a game in Utah just before tip-off.
That was just slice of a historic month, pandemic-wise.
On March 16, the first Trump administration launched the era of social distancing with a program called “15 Days to Slow the Spread.” On March 19, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered the nation’s first statewide lockdown. On March 27, President Donald Trump signed a bipartisan stimulus package that provided $2 trillion for Americans who needed help.
It didn’t end with March, of course. Every minute of early 2020 – when body counts soared (by June 1, 110,000 Americans were dead), and the economy teetered (unemployment in April hit 14.7%), and everyone you knew apparently took up baking (in early 2020 U.S. yeast sales jumped six-fold) – felt world-changing and memorable.
But you know what didn’t feel that way? May 5, 2023.
That’s the day the World Health Organization declared that the pandemic officially was done.
Yes, they said, the disease still might morph into something super lethal. And, even without that, COVID-19 still would continue to kill some people who contracted it. But, overall, they said the availability of vaccines and natural immunity were so widespread that, going forward, COVID-19 was (and is) more of a health challenge than a hair-on-fire health emergency.
That news didn’t crack many front pages and government officials didn’t talk it up in public briefings. The biggest health crisis of this century – which began with minute-by-minute updates and running body counts on news chyrons – ended with a widely ignored press release.
Maybe the world ignored that because we weren’t ready. At some point, “good” pandemic news, whatever that was, felt somewhat off-point. And health experts? It seemed like nobody was listening to them. It also seemed like people decided the pandemic was about a lot of things: political division, lost trust, closed schools, masks – almost anything other than death.
All of which, years later, still puzzles Patty Trejo, a special education aid who lives in Anaheim.
During a three-week window in early 2021, Trejo, now 58, saw both her father and her husband die of COVID-19.
The pandemic that was inconvenient or vaguely threatening for most of us was, for Trejo, life-changing.
Why couldn’t others see that?
“It just took a lot,” she said last week. “That disease took a lot from me.”
She wasn’t alone, of course. For millions, the pandemic wasn’t about whether the disease did or didn’t start in a lab or if it was fair to be forced to wear a mask. It was about loss. People died. Businesses failed. School was missed.
The virus and the pandemic it sparked took something, big or small, from just about everybody.
Here’s how some of those losses have been felt in the years since.
Joe Trejo
There’s a very specific reason why the pandemic still grinds on for Trejo, and it’s not just grief. Her mother, Gloria Rios, has dementia, and the pandemic seems to be her touchstone.
“When anybody is feeling sick, or when she’s feeling not great, my mom says it’s because they’ve got COVID,” Trejo said.
“So I still hear about COVID,” she added, sighing. “A lot.”
Trejo’s name might ring a bell. She made news in February 2021, after she hired a mariachi band to serenade her husband, Joe Trejo, from the parking lot of an Anaheim hospital. At the time, he was inside, in a medically induced coma and breathing through a ventilator, struggling to somehow beat COVID-19.
The gesture was poignant, coming the day after Valentine’s. And, while it was a long shot, it seemed possible that when Patty pressed her phone near Joe’s face, and the sound of the band belting out “La Mano de Dios” (The Hand of God) filled the room, he heard it.
“His hand moved when they were playing,” she said. “I saw it. The nurse told me she saw it, too.
“So, I believe Joe heard the music. I still choose to believe that.”
A lot of news outlets picked up the mariachis-in-the-parking lot story. Fewer picked up the follow-up, from March 1, 2021, that reported Joe’s death.
He was one of 6,731 Americans who died of COVID-19 that week, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control. In such a grim shuffle, it was easy for a single death to melt away and for most of the world to move on.
Trejo could not.
Two weeks after Joe passed, she returned to work. She was hugged. She was encouraged. And she felt horrible. “Oh, that day, I really struggled.”
Two weeks after that, the devout Catholic held Joe’s funeral. That, too, was hard. “I’d never had a panic attack in my life. Until we buried Joe.”
For a year she went to Joe’s grave nearly every day. “I’d just lay on the ground,” she said. “It’s the closest I can be to his body. And in the grass, I could talk to him.”
But as the world moved on from the pandemic, events in Trejo’s life kept snapping her back.
In mid-2023, she moved their middle son, a large man in his early 30s who is autistic, to a group home. It wasn’t what she and Joe and planned, and it was a painful reminder of his absence.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I think. But with Joe gone… “
She said she’s felt Joe in good times, too. Two years ago, when Trejo and some friends traveled to Portugal, she says he was with her “every step.” Same thing last summer, when she visited family in Mexico.
More recently she’s struggled again, this time with an unusual form of cancer. She’s endured radiation and an unclear diagnosis, though for the moment she’s upbeat.
Through it all, she felt – and feels – Joe. She says it might be her forever normal.
“Hope broke me, I guess.”
Hard switch
Not every pandemic loss was so obvious.
Nurses and doctors working in hospitals when the death counts crested in Southern California – late 2020 and early 2021 – lost thousands of patients.
And, too often, they lost each other.
As public health experts began to track who was and who wasn’t dying of the coronavirus, they found that people who worked with the public generally were hit hard, and that in the earliest months of the pandemic nurses and physicians were hit hardest of all.
“We lost at least 17 nurses,” said Dr. Ileana Meza, a nurse practitioner at Los Angeles General Hospital, a key hub of COVID-19 treatment during the height of the pandemic.
“That was one of the really horrible things.”
Other losses were less dramatic but just as real.
The phrase “war zone” became a pandemic cliché for a reason. While the dangers weren’t the same, the idea wasn’t far off. Health workers saw work days filled with a level of death they’d never experienced, and home lives filled with, say, coloring books.
Balancing all that was unexpected and, often, not easy.
“It was a hard switch, every time,” said Kimberly Richards, a nurse who lives in Upland with her husband, Matt, and their two children, Macy, now 10 and Chase, now 6.
“I definitely lost some hugs.”
Pre-surge, Richards, now 39, worked as an orthopedic and surgical nurse. Pain and rehab were common. Death was not.
But when the surge kicked in locally, Richards switched, temporarily, to a different type of nursing. Her work days became a grim conveyor belt, identifying people who needed life-saving care and doing what she could for the intubated and the comatose. Watching people struggle and eventually die became routine.
It wasn’t easy stuff to bring home, not for Richards or her kids, then ages 6 and 2.
Technically, the work-to-home transition didn’t even start with the kids. Richards, like thousands of health care workers, changed in the garage as soon as she pulled in from work, a basic step to keep the virus out of their house.
It didn’t even begin with the first sight of her kids, who weren’t allowed to hug her until she’d showered upstairs.
“A lot of days I just needed a little time,” Richards said. “It was about trying to maintain that composure.”
“I’m sure the kids noticed,” she added. “They wondered why all I’d want to do is hug them. And then, when you do get the hugs, you’d start crying.
“I’m sure they thought it was all pretty weird.”
The kids, of course, also were living in a pandemic.
Their daughter was starting kindergarten at the time remotely, meaning she met a teacher and new friends via computer screen. Her youngest, now in kindergarten himself (traditionally), was a toddler who wasn’t allowed to play much with others or get outside as much as they all wanted.
Richards said they all coped, and are closer today because of it.
“Looking back, I’d say it was survival mode. … I did what I had to do as a mom and as a nurse,” Richards said.
“We got through it.”
Peace of mind
To understand how the pandemic stole Kevin Deegan’s hard-earned peace of mind, and how he’s trying to get it back, you first have to understand the physical side of what it is to be a chaplain in a hospital.
Deegan, who today is the manager of Spiritual Care at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank but five years ago was one of the center’s in-room chaplains, was trained like others in his field. That means he’d been taught to bend down, if necessary, to greet the grieving at eye level. He knew to sit in a way that suggested he was available if they needed, literally, to cry on his shoulder or hug him for comfort.
He also was taught to listen when appropriate, but to step outside as the soon-to-be bereaved whisper their goodbyes to the soon-to-be departed.
Five years ago, when the pandemic surge started hitting Southern California and Deegan’s hospital, like all others in the region, became a place where hundreds of COVID-19 patients came to get better or to die, those elements of Deegan’s training became moot.
Lockdown care turned Deegan into a conduit, not a chaplain.
Instead of hugs, he could offer only an iPad or phone screen. Instead of looking someone in the eye, he gazed at whole families via computer app.
And, instead of letting people say the most intimate words they would ever exchange in private, Deegan – like so many chaplains – relayed those messages himself.
“We saw it as our job to keep families connected, even at that moment,” Deegan said.
Especially at that moment.
Turns out there was another element of chaplain training that was being violated by the pandemic.
“We’re taught to NOT become family,” Deegan said.
“You become useless when you become the family. If you’re sharing their experience, you can no longer be the guide for them.”
Deegan remained a guide, he said. But he often felt the burden of being their family, too. That’s not trivial. It’s horrible to lose one parent or spouse or child. It’s another to lose hundreds, over and over, for a couple years.
Deegan survived, of course. He even thrived, helping hundreds of families through their worst moments. Two years ago, he was promoted to oversee an element of care, spiritual health, that his hospital views as essential.
Then, nearly a year ago, on March 24, 2024, Palm Sunday, a fissure emerged.
Deegan’s back gave out.
It was bad enough that he couldn’t get off the floor. His wife called paramedics, a move that Deegan said was “a little embarrassing” because, as chaplain at a local hospital, “I knew some of them from work.”
Deegan eventually was helped into bed. And, after that, he was prescribed medicine that eased his pain and his back muscles enough that he soon was up and back to normal.
He also went to a psychiatrist.
There, Deegan said, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. All those families, the intimate moments, the grief – the death – were still playing out somewhere in Deegan’s psyche. It would be normal in war and it was definitely normal from the pandemic.
“I was told I was still dealing with all of that, literally, in my nervous system,” Deegan said.
“I was still in fight-or-flight mode.”
Maybe we all are.