They died saving others from Covid. Will anyone count them?
15 minutes to read
By: Andrew Jacobs
Medical workers are called heroes. But there hasn t been a national reckoning over the many thousands lost to Covid. Here are a few of the people who gave their lives while on the front lines of the pandemic.
Dr. Claire Rezba is exhausted from counting the dead.
An anaesthesiologist in Virginia, Rezba, 41, has spent the past year running a Twitter feed that memorialises American health care workers who have died of Covid-19. So far, she has published more than 2,500 tributes to the doctors, emergency room nurses, respiratory therapists and mental health counsellors cut down in their prime. Although she knows there are at least a thousand other deaths that remain unrecognised, Rezba plans to discontinue the project at the end of March.
States have responded to the slow rollout of coronavirus vaccine by expanding eligibility for the shots to people over 65. But the moves have made it more difficult to recruit and retain test subjects for clinical trials of vaccines that have yet to win emergency authorization.