A pandemic year

Post Reports

The Washington Post

Daily News, Politics, News

4.4 • 5.1K Ratings

🗓️ 12 March 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Reflecting on the anniversary of the pandemic, from the eyes of a nurse on New York’s front lines.

Jessica Montanaro thrives in a high-stakes, high-pressure world. As a nurse at an intensive care unit in New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Montanaro is accustomed to leaping into action when patients’ lives are at stake. And when the coronavirus hit the U.S., Montanaro, like so many health-care workers, found herself at the center of the chaos.

One year after the WHO declared the coronavirus a pandemic, Montanaro reflects on her experiences caring for an influx of covid-19 patients and battling exhaustion and grief in her ICU. In this episode, producer Bishop Sand brings us into Montanaro’s world, as the virus drastically — and permanently — changed it.

Nearly a year ago, Post Reports did another story about Mount Sinai as doctors and nurses braced themselves for the worst of the surge in New York City. Listen back to “A New York hospital transformed by the pandemic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports.
0:05.6	I'm Martin Powers.
0:07.7	It's Friday, March 12th.
0:14.7	So I think that we all have a memory from a year ago of the moment when we realized that
0:21.5	everything was going to change because of the coronavirus.
0:25.7	I know I have that moment like a distinct time and place when I was like, oh wow, things
0:31.9	are going to be different.
0:34.4	And I feel like a lot of other people have that moment too.
0:36.8	Yeah, I mean, I remember when I was hearing about the bars closing in New York.
0:41.5	It just felt like such a monumental thing.
0:43.3	It was like the earth was stopping.
0:48.7	This is Bishop Sand.
0:51.0	He's an audio producer for the post.
0:53.1	And this week we're looking back on a pandemic year.
0:58.4	For New York nurse Jessica Montanero, she knew that things were going to be different
1:03.0	when patients began pouring into her intensive care unit.
1:06.5	It was like, oh, COVID's here.
1:09.6	And it just went into complete chaos.
1:12.6	Today, as we mark a year since the start of the pandemic, we're going to spend the
1:17.0	episode looking back on the past year through the eyes of this one nurse.
1:32.0	So who is Jessica and what was her day-to-day life like in her ICU before COVID?
1:39.4	Jessica is 41 years old.
	...

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