A ‘bad case of déjà vu’: New Jersey hospitals brace for Covid-19 surge, but hope this time will be different
The first round of treating Covid-19 patients in New Jersey was brutal. Victorine Long Njaka, a nurse at Trinitas Regional Medical Center in Elizabeth, can’t shake the memory of a 34-year-old patient from last spring. He could barely breathe, and was so weakened by the virus, he seemed to have lost his will to live.
Long Njaka, 37, couldn’t bear more deaths of people her age. Her brain was overloaded with the constant calls over the hospital intercom for coronavirus patients in respiratory or cardiac arrest — “Code Blue 19” — and with all the bodies she had escorted to the morgue.
