For California Covid nurses, past and present collide

With little knowledge of how to treat patients, and amid enormous personal risks, the nurses had leaped into the abyss. They will never be the same.

In early 2020, when the coronavirus began making it difficult for many people around the world to breathe, hospitals became a central front against a disease that, more than a year later, has killed nearly 4 million human beings and counting. At one hospital in Mission Viejo, California, a team of nurses and doctors were recruited for what became the Isolation Intensive Care Unit. Many volunteers at Providence Mission Hospital had come from cardiac and surgical intensive care units, where they deal with death and trauma each day. Launched in March 2020, the isolation unit would come to be known as “Tip of the Spear,” a military term used to describe a group doing dangerous work. Many nurses who would spend countless hours with patients, helping them return to health or helping them say goodbye to family, got tattooed with spears, hash marks and a heart.