71
now, Martin is fighting the U.S.’s third wave in her
own hospital, Baxter Regional Medical Center, work-
ing 12- to 14-hour days. “We will take care of our
community,” she says simply.
Often, taking care of the community has meant not
taking care of the self. “I saw more people die this year
than I probably saw in the last 10 or 15 years of my ca-
reer,” says Dr. Alan Roth, 60, chairman of the depart-
ment of family medicine at Jamaica Hospital Medical
Center in Queens, N.Y. Roth contracted the disease
back in March and is now suffering from long-hauler
syndrome—experiencing crushing fatigue months
after the acute phase of the disease passed. But he
is standing his post as the third wave crashes over
the nation. “I’ve worked seven days a week for many
years of my life, but I never have been as physically
and emotionally washed out as I am now,” he says.
All over the world, there have been similar dis-
plays of dedication, of sacrifice. It hasn’t been
health care workers alone who have carried that
burden. Teachers, food- service workers, pharmacy
employees and others running essential businesses
have all done heroic work. But it is the members
of the health community who have led the push—
taking on the job when the pandemic was new and
they were hailed as heroes—with evening cheers
from a grateful public. Now the cheers have largely
stopped, the public is fatigued, and the frontline
workers themselves are sometimes even resented—seen as somehow responsible for the prohibitions
and constrained lives we’ve all had to live. But the
workers are pressing on all the same—bone-tired
maybe, but smarter and tougher. Their stories are
all different. Their courage is shared.When her phone rang in March, Ornella
Calderone, a 33-year-old medical graduate in
Turin, Italy, had a feeling the call would change
her life. Italy was then the global epicenter of
what the World Health Organization had just de-
clared a pandemic, and Calderone offered her ser-
vices to a hospital in Cremona, one of the country’s
hot spots. The call was from the hospital telling her
she was very much needed. Two days later, she was
in the thick of the fight, working in the pulmon-
ology ward with other novice doctors, tending to
COVID-19 patients in critical condition.
“We were forced to absorb the concepts in a very
short time, to learn everything right away,” she says.
One thing they learned fast was how to offer succor—
not just to treat the sick, but also to comfort them. “I
would take their hand while they were speaking to
me, and everything changed,” she says. “They held
on tight, almost a reflexive action, like babies do.”
Calderone returned to Turin in June, after the
first wave ended; today she works in a local facility
that was once a nursing home but was converted to
a COVID-19 hospital when the disease crested againREBECCA MARTIN
Pulmonologist, left;
Mountain Home, Ark.
Early in the spring,
Martin flew to New
York to assist when
the city was the
nation’s corona virus
hot spot. Back in
Arkansas, she is
now battling the
disease in her
own hospital. “We
will take care of
our community,”
she says.LIU CHUN
Respiratory doctor,
above; Changsha,
China
Liu and 129 other
doctors at her
hospital volunteered
to travel to Wuhan in
early February when
it was the COVID-19
epicenter. Volunteers
wept in fear on the
flight to Wuhan, and
one, fearing he might
die from the virus,
wrote out a will.
MARTIN: LIZ SANDERS FOR TIME; LIU: RONGHUI CHEN FOR TIME