17-year-old Robert Cordova called 911 when his mom’s coronavirus symptoms became severe. “They came to pick her up and they put her in an ambulance,” he said. “We didn’t know if that was the last time we were going to see her.”
The single mother was hospitalized in Yakima, Washington for nearly a month, on a ventilator
“When she was when she was in the coma,” Robert said. “We… we didn’t know what to do.”
Now home, Bertha Cordova believes she contracted COVID-19 while working at a fruit packaging plant. All three of her children and her mother were diagnosed with more mild cases. They are among the nearly 50,000 Washingtonians to get COVID-19 since the state’s first outbreak in January. Washington was the country’s original epicenter.
Governor Jay Inslee’s stay-at-home order seemed to bring things under control and, like other current hotspots, it began to reopen in May. But despite its head start, crowded working conditions, opposition to masks, and general quarantine fatigue, have helped set the state back with confirmed cases rising since early June.
Brandy Wiltermuth is a nurse practitioner using this makeshift medical tent to serve a food distribution center in Yakima County. “The virus is going to do whatever it’s going to do and all it needs is a little bit of help to kind of go crazy,” she said.
Agricultural workers, like Bertha, are considered essential. “They were only separated, like she said, about this distance with a plastic screen with them and masks and gloves,” Robert explained.
Rural Yakima County now has the second-highest number of cases in Washington. Yet, state-mandated mask-wearing has been slow to catch on.
Wiltermuth said, “It would be different if everybody did everything that they possibly could, but we haven’t seen that.”
Governor Inslee is now reinstating restrictions on social gatherings, hitting already-struggling businesses hard.
Special events promoter Grant Harrington said, “You can only go through this so many times before people just throw up their hands and they’re like, ‘what’s the use?'”
Harrington said he’s lost up to $400,000 in revenue this year. “There’s a lack of morale,” he said. “There’s a lack of like motivation. And I think that we’ve got to find ways to be proactive in safely opening businesses so we can have time to prepare, so we can do it safer.”
Health officials worry Washington could become the next California or Florida. That’s why the governor is taking a hard stance on requiring masks.
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