LOS ANGELES â It had been a long time since Allen Cortez and his wife had a date night. As a Kaiser Permanente ICU nurse in a COVID-19 ward, Cortez spent the last 13 months on the frontlines of the pandemic, taking one tragic day at a time as his team worked to understand the novel coronavirus and how to deal with its baffling array of symptoms.
"People say it takes a certain kind of person to be dealing with that type of stress, but we weren't alone, we had each other," Cortez said of the doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists and others who showed up day in and day out while COVID-19 burned its way through the region.