Inside STAT: In the Covid-19 death of a hospital food worker, a microcosm of the pandemic

YOLANDA DESIR DISPLAYS A PHOTOGRAPH OF HER LATE SISTER, MARIE DEUS, WHO DIED OF COVID-19. (KAYANA SZYMCZAK FOR STAT)

The hospital’s first employee to die of Covid-19 was a kitchen worker named Marie Deus. She was 65, a workaholic, and a germophobe — obsessions she’d only acquired when she came from Haiti to Boston 40 years ago. The clinicians who cared for her were petrified. They knew her from the halls, knew she didn’t have all that much patient contact. If she were this sick, what did that mean for them? But it turned out that her illness was part of a pattern — and it wasn’t what her doctors expected. In intertwining these two stories, from Port-au-Prince to Mattapan, hospital kitchen to incident command, reporter Eric Boodman shows what the smallest details of a life can reveal about the sweep of the pandemic. Read more.