In his off time, medical ICU nurse Oh Young-jun sketches scenes from his job within a coronavirus isolation ward in South Korea.
The stoop of a nurse's shoulders as she carries buckets brimming with biohazard waste. The tangle of a towel holding up hair dripping wet from a shower after hours in a hazmat suit. The momentary reprieve of a nurse sitting upright and nodding off in a desk chair, her hand propping up a face bandaged in spots where protective equipment has chafed her skin.
His trench in this fight is removed from the front lines of the battle — the hardest hit in South Korea was the city of Daegu and surrounding areas in the southeast of the country, where hospitals were overwhelmed by a surge of several thousands at the height of the country's outbreak in late February.
That was reflected in the way many patients and family members spoke to and treated nurses — addressing them as"miss" or"you there," raining them with demands and abuse without the deference shown to physicians. In sparse drawings, as if whispers on a page, he used rough strokes and few colors. He began chronicling a sporadic series titled"Nursing Story" on Facebook — part work diary, part medical notes and part personal journal exploring the woes, joys and everything in between of life as a nurse.
Many hospitals, including Oh's, weren't prepared to handle the outbreak, lacking isolation beds and protective equipment. A doctor was infected in Seoul, putting medical workers on edge. Oh's hospital asked for volunteers to staff a ward for patients showing symptoms of the virus. South Korea, too, was ready. Many hospitals had set up negative pressure isolation wards and separate departments to handle infectious disease outbreaks. Protective equipment, of which there had been a shortage in 2015, was in ready supply for medical professionals. Despite an early surge that made South Korea the largest cluster outside of China, the country appeared to get a handle on local transmissions that brought societies elsewhere to a halt and caused staggering numbers of deaths.
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