Former Hartford Courant reporter Tracy Gordon Fox serves on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic in Connecticut as an RN at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center. She shared her thoughts in an affecting op-ed for the Courant.
Here’s an excerpt:
I was a police reporter for 23 years at The Hartford Courant before deciding to become a nurse. I went with police on drug busts while wearing bullet-proof vests, rode with state troopers driving more than 100 mph and went alone to homicide scenes in high-crime neighborhoods with only a press pass to protect me.
Not much scares me, but the coronavirus did. In early January, I began seeing bootleg videos from Wuhan, China, of nurses weeping after their shifts, their faces bruised by the tight seal of their N-95 masks as they watched patient after patient die. Nurses are a tough bunch; they don’t normally cry like that. There were stories of colleagues in their 30s and 40s coming down with the virus, requiring intubation, and of patients suddenly dying — even though a day earlier they seemed to be getting better.
This was clearly no flu virus.
