David Hao, MD, wasn’t emotionally prepared for the crush of severely ill patients with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) who came under his care in March 2020. Many were young, sedated, and dying alone. Sometimes while FaceTiming with their families, Hao saw very young children on the screen.
“It was frightening,” Hao, an anesthesia resident at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in an interview. “A lot of the things that we typically see in the intensive care unit with passing [away]—in terms of people being able to chat with their family members, being able to understand and communicate with clinicians about what exactly is going on—was taken away from them.”