“It’s soul-draining... But we all have our ethos and our calling for why we’re doing this"

The hospital is short on staff because of a mixture of employee burnout and positive coronavirus tests among their own health workers. Last month, the state formally requested backup from the federal government, which promptly deployed emergency staff to this city of 225,000 so the hospital could continue admitting patients.

One physician assistant working a two-week shift in Baton Rouge, Erin Lennon, said she received her request to deploy to Louisiana while halfway through a noon-to-midnight shift at her full-time job in Colorado. Like Ingle, she was given a night’s notice to pack and board a plane at the crack of dawn.

She came despite personal risk — she is pregnant with a child due in November — and despite the pent-up exhaustion of a year and a half of work treating Covid-19 patients.

“It’s soul-draining,” she said. “But we all have our ethos and our calling for why we’re doing this. This is what we trained for. This is what we do. I can’t walk away from something that’s important just because it’s hard.”