A year after its first COVID patient, Jackson honors staff and remembers lives lost
March 19 marked a year since Jackson Health System saw its first COVID-19 patient admitted into one of its hospitals.
A year since Jackson’s staff, like the rest of the community, began “walking through the valley of the shadow of death,” said Rev. Jacqueline D. Kelley shortly before calling for a moment of silence to remember the “personal heroes” that were lost in the pandemic.
Kelley, director of Jackson’s spiritual care services, spoke at a ceremony Friday to commemorate the day Jackson Health entered the fight against COVID-19, surrounded by a memorial of blue and white flags planted in Alamo Park at Jackson’s Miami campus, 1611 NW 12th Ave.
The blue flags symbolize Jackson’s 5,360 COVID-19 survivors. The white flags symbolize the 977 lives lost at Miami-Dade County’s public hospital since last March. Three of those who died were Jackson employees:
Devin Dale Francis, radiology technician at Jackson Memorial Hospital, ER; Dr. Luis Caldera-Nieves, OB/GYN at UHealth/Jackson; and Araceli Buendia Ilagan, ICU nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
“At the time we knew so little about the virus, how it spread, or who was most at risk. We also had no idea how long it would last or the impact it would have on our reality,” said Jackson Health President and CEO Carlos Migoya.
COVID struck Florida hard and Miami-Dade early on became the state’s epicenter for the disease. The county has confirmed more than 432,000 cases and more than 5,700 deaths, making Miami-Dade the fourth-highest county in the country in COVID cases, after Los Angeles, Maricopa and Cook counties, according to Friday’s Johns Hopkins University dashboard.
“In my eyes, you’re not just heroes, you’re superheroes,” Migoya said. “As we reflect in the last year, the trauma we’ve endured and the hardships we have faced, never forget that the work you have done throughout this pandemic has made a lasting impression . ... I always say that Jackson is not the buildings but rather the miracle workers inside of these buildings.”
The pandemic is not over yet, but the tide has changed. Doctors now know more about the disease and how to treat patients, cases are declining, and there are three COVID-19 vaccines available in the United States, all which have shown to be effective in helping to prevent severe disease and death.
More than 2.5 million Floridians have been fully vaccinated. Jackson has helped vaccinate more than 123,000 people in the past three months.
“We have not let this silent enemy defeat us,” Migoya said.