Agape Care // The Post and Courier

When COVID-19 cases and fatalities started mounting dramatically in New York City earlier this year, Devra Wright asked herself, “Is there a way that I can help?”

Wright had 10 years experience as a nurse and at the time was working for the pediatric hospice arm of Agape Care in South Carolina. Plus, she’d lived in New York City before.

In fact, a friend of hers was working as an administrator at New York-Presbyterian in Manhattan. He connected her with the director of nursing at the hospital, who called Wright and said, “We definitely need you.”

So, Wright asked for a leave of absence from her hospice job in Charleston.

Her boss didn’t hesitate with an answer: “Go for it.”

That’s how Wright found herself in New York for eight weeks this summer. She lived in Edgewater, New Jersey, and commuted to the hospital across the Hudson River in Manhattan.

“When I first got there — you’re getting ready to go and you’re having anticipation and nervousness — but when I got into Newwark (Liberty International Airport), I cried,” she said. “I’ve never been so scared. I was scared to death.”

New York, and New York City, in particular, has been hit hardest by the coronavirus pandemic compared to the rest of the United States.

More than 220,000 people in New York City have been diagnosed with COVID-19 this year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By comparison, 124,000 positive tests have been conducted in the whole state of South Carolina.

More than 23,000 people in New York City have died from the virus.

In mid-April, when 758 people in across New York state died in a 24-hour period, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said during a daily press briefing, “Every one is a face and a name and a family that is suffering. This is truly tragic news.”

At the height of the pandemic, more than 800 people in New York City alone died in a single day from the virus, when both probable and confirmed fatalities were taken into account.

Wright arrived in the city a few weeks after the pandemic peaked.

“I really didn’t think I was going to survive. I really thought I was going to die,” she said. “I thought I was going to get COVID and this was going to be my chapter. I was literally terrified.”

She told herself she would take it one day at a time, working 12- or 13-hour shifts four days a week.

She wore an N-95 mask at all times, except when she was eating. She was perplexed why many of her fellow nurses would remove their masks during the morning huddle to drink coffee, until she realized that most of them had already been diagnosed and survived COVID-19.

She took care of children and adults, both those who had been diagnosed with coronavirus and those who hadn’t. Many of her patients died, some of them who were young and otherwise healthy.

“A lot of people are surviving it, but a lot of people aren’t,” she said. “People kind of walked around with fear in their eyes of dying. People took it very seriously (in New York) because they saw what it could do and they didn’t want to die from it. And here (in South Carolina), it’s not like that.”

Wright returned to Charleston after eight weeks in New York, even though New York-Presbyterian wanted to her stay on another three months. She was ready to come home.

“To be honest, I was ready for some normalcy. I wanted to eat at restaurant. I wanted to not wear my mask all the time,” she said. “Then, all of a sudden, our numbers started climbing.”

While New Yorkers successfully beat back the worst of the pandemic since its peak in April, South Carolina cases have been trending in the wrong direction.

While case counts in the Palmetto State have started to decline, COVID-19 numbers here remain much higher than anything recorded in March or April.

As of Thursday, more than 1,800 people have died in South Carolina from the coronavirus, according to the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

Wright, for one, is watching those numbers and taking them seriously.

“I wish people could see this. People should be able to see a 20-year-old fighting for his life on a ventilator,” she said. “Your little backyard barbecue could kill you. … Unfortunately, this is the new world we’re living in.”