As the coronavirus crisis unfolded, no place was harder hit than New York. Thousands of health care workers from all over the country—many of them women—answered the call to assist the city. Here, a few of their faces, captured just outside the temporary field hospital created within the Javits Convention Center on Manhattan’s West Side.
Cindy Lim Dagsaan
“We came to make a difference in a short amount of time,” says Dagsaan, a Navy reservist and nurse practitioner from California. “Our fellow health care providers have been working tirelessly, and it’s an honor to be working to give them a reprieve.”
Tanzania Johnson
“Having to think on my feet has been the biggest challenge,” says Johnson, a Navy hospital corpsman and respiratory therapist technician from Maryland. “A lot of this is new—information changes every hour.”
Patricia Riley
“I came because I don’t have small children,” says Riley, who works for the New York State Department of Health in Albany. “I wanted to do my part so that people with children could stay home with them.”
Jennifer Ratcliff
“I’ve never seen this many patients in one place,” says Ratcliff, an Air Force colonel and orthopedic surgeon based in Florida. “This is almost like being deployed—people having to find different places to work and use different resources to get the job done.”
Morrisa Rice
“I left behind a husband and two children who are both 2020 graduates, one from high school and one from college,” says Morrisa Rice, a commissioned officer in the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. “They understood the oath that I took…and they’ve been nothing but supportive. Since New York is my home state, they knew how important it was to me that I came back to serve.”
Christopher Tejada
“It’s very hard to know you can’t immediately cure each and every patient,” says Tejada, an Army private and surgical technician. “You want all your patients to immediately be better, and that isn’t always how it works.”
Ken Dixon
“Preparing our staff for a non-COVID hospital and changing at the last minute, basically overnight, to a COVID hospital was very challenging,” says Dixon, who oversees all safety and security operations at the Javits Center.