75
were in college again,” Amy Twyman, the assisted-
living facility’s executive director, says. The result of
the voluntary quarantine? As of this writing, there
have been more than 350,000 COVID-19 cases and
72,000 deaths in U.S. nursing homes—but not a sin-
gle Sharon Brooke resident or active employee has
contracted the virus.
Concerns that schools, like nursing homes, would
become viral danger zones left the country’s more
than 13,000 school districts scrambling to figure out
all manner of home and hybrid learning systems on
the fly. That has posed special challenges for school
nurses like Shelah McMillan, 46, who works at the
Rudolph Blankenburg School in Philadelphia, as well
as in the emergency room of the city’s Einstein Medi-
cal Center. With her school district having gone to
fully remote learning, McMillan worries that a vital
piece of the children’s medical care is going missing.
“We bridge the gap between the medical com-
munity and the families,” she says. “When you’re in
the building, you get to see your children and you
get to know your frequent fliers, and you get to hug
your babies. Now you can’t see them, and it’s harder
to track.” Still, tracking her babies she is, creating a
phone number to field calls and texts from parents,
and answering questions about the pandemic and
individual students’ health. When she doesn’t hear
from parents, she reaches out on her own.
Since the spring, McMillan has also worked with
the Black Doctors COVID-19 Consortium, which
provides free testing in African- American commu-
nities in Philadelphia that have been hardest hit
by the virus. According to U.S. Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention figures from Nov. 30, Black
Americans are at 1.4 times greater risk of contracting
COVID-19 than white non-Hispanics; among His-
panic communities, the risk is 1.7 times greater. Both
groups are at 2.8 times greater risk of death from the
disease than white people. Income disparities and
lack of access to health care facilities and insurance
are all drivers of the inequality. McMillan and others
have been doing what they can to bring health—and
equity—to these communities.
For all the frontline workers have done to pro-
tect and serve, too many of them have been feeling
increasingly underappreciated. Jim Gentile, 64, a
surgical- services nurse at St. Mary Medical Center in
Langhorne, Pa., is part of a staff that has seen its pa-
tient count explode during pandemic peaks. Gentile
considers the ideal patient- to-nurse ratio 3 to 1, but
in recent months that has often spiked to 6 or 7 to 1.
“It was taxing physically to say the very least, and
it was emotionally taxing because they were dying
right and left. I wrapped more bodies in two months
than I did in 25 years,” Gentile says of the spring.
“You have to steel yourself. You fall apart on your
way home in the car. You fall apart in the shower.
And 12 hours later, you’re back in the show again.”
TANYA LYNNE
ROBINSON
Home health aide,
above; Cleveland
With asthma and
multiple sclerosis,
Robinson is at
higher risk of
contracting a severe
case of COVID-19.
Nonetheless, she
continues to tend
to her housebound
patients—at one
point without
enough PPE.
SHELAH
MCMILLAN
School nurse, left;
Philadelphia
McMillan, an ER
nurse on the
side, keeps track
of her students
even with schools
closed, setting up a
phone line to field
questions from
parents about their
children’s health.
MCMILLAN: CAROLINE TOMPKINS FOR TIME; ROBINSON: DA’SHAUNAE MARISA FOR TIME
