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LOS ANGELES – “I remember being scared,” said U.S. Air Force Senior Airman Giovanny Macias, studying the desk in front of him as if he could see the newscast running across the screen of his memories. “It was March 2020, it was a flu in China, then suddenly it was off the California coast.”
Despite the rumors of a potential pandemic spreading across the world, Macias – who also works a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service – walked his route every day.
“I had CNN on all day and night,” said U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Alisha Hardy-Taylor, the noncommissioned officer in charge of the Cal Guard mortuary affairs team activated for pandemic response in 2021 and 2022.
She was a property manager for Raytheon in Los Angeles County at the time. “I had this gut feeling that something bad was going to happen.”
She sent her son to her mother’s home in Tennessee. A few days later, the California National Guard called her to report in support of her state.
Macias and a few hundred other Soldiers and Airmen were summoned as well.
As the world collectively struggled in the wake of COVID-19, service members like Macias and Hardy-Taylor were considering a different reaction: What could they do to support their neighbors?
From the first test kits dropped to the Grand Princess cruise ship off the coast of San Francisco to the current deployment of more National Guard troops across the state, Guardsmen donned their uniforms and became a barrier of protection that allowed society to continue living.
Thousands of California citizen Soldiers and Airmen were activated to aid foodbanks, testing and vaccination sites, medical supply warehouses, and many other domestic support operations.
For a small group of service members, the mission went beyond supporting the living. The cycle of life demands birth, life, and death.
These troops were charged with aiding the county in caring for the deceased.
“We are there to give families peace of mind in knowing that we are caring for their loved ones,” said Hardy-Taylor. She has been on and off orders, switching back and forth from part-time to full-time military service since the pandemic shut down the world.
In 2021, 42 Cal Guard troops worked with LA County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s office during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overwhelmed by the COVID Omicron-variant surge in January 2022, the county again requested additional support from the Cal Guard.
Ten Soldiers and Airmen supported the county in transporting, casket building for crematoriums, sanitizing, and aided county staff in caring for the deceased until June 30 when the mission officially ended.
While almost all had worked this mission last year, they found themselves facing a new challenge; the ripple effects of COVID throughout our society and economy. Though not all related to the virus, the increase in deaths from homicides, suicides, vehicular accidents, drug overdoses, and other causes of death have amounted to a significant increase that has challenged the current staff of LA County.
“In the past two years, they’ve been overwhelmed by the number of cases that came in,” said U.S. Army Sgt. Kenneth Rivera, military police with the 40th Military Police Company. “Not all were COVID related.
People being laid off, use of drugs because they had family members pass… they are just looking toward another way of coping with their issues.”
Many large cities have seen an increase in COVID positive cases. LA County Department of Public Health reported 2.8 million cases of COVID-19 and 31,046 deaths since 2020.
According to LA County Sheriff’s Department, there were nearly 400 homicides in 2021, a 11.8% increase compared to 2020. Over 1,500 people have died of accidental drug overdoses since the pandemic began in LA.
“Working here, I get the understanding of it has to be done as a job and I give it to the people that work here every single day,” said Rivera. “It’s not a job for everyone.”
The team’s job is supporting the coroner’s office in any way possible including assisting with autopsies and transferring deceased to different departments in the morgue.
“We’ll help with transfers to the photo room, x-rays, anywhere that we can help out,” said Rivera. “Then we get a list of how many deceased that we need to move into the autopsy room to help them process their day and get them out.”
While the team finds their work meaningful, it’s not without its challenges.
One morning before sunrise, a refrigeration unit in a storage trailer wasn’t functioning correctly. The team had to move all deceased from one trailer to another to ensure the remains were stored properly.
They donned personal protective equipment that consisted of blue protective gowns, latex gloves, filtered masks, and blue booties to mitigate exposure to the fluids and smells of decomposing remains.
Once the trailer was opened, the team worked quickly guiding gurneys up and down the slick metal ramps, working hand in hand with county employees until each decedent was identified with their new location annotated in the records.
All of this happened within the first hours of the day. And it was only the first task of many solemn duties the team would complete.
After the unexpected emergency was handled, each person began disrobing their soiled protective gear in silence, taking a moment mentally and physically to rest before they put on new aprons and gloves.
Again.
“I can tell you it’s not easy, because you’re seeing young deceased and elderly, but the ones you don’t want to see are the children,” said Rivera, the father of two young daughters at home. “That really takes a toll.”
In the six months from January through June, the team of ten Guardsmen assisted with 12,796 decedent transfers and 15,015 lab services, movements, casket builds and other tasks unique to the mission.
With experience as their guide, the team worked through a workload three-and-a-half times that of 2021 and they did it with a quarter of the manpower they had the first time around.
The two most critical data points are not captured in the numbers: the names of the dead and the family members affected by each.
“You really don’t know when it’s going to be your last breath, so value each other, value life,” said Hardy-Taylor. “I know that when I go home now, I don’t think about things that are going to happen two weeks from now. I literally take in just being there in that moment with my son and making sure that I have just time for him.”
| Date Taken: | 07.20.2022 |
| Date Posted: | 12.22.2022 16:13 |
| Story ID: | 435754 |
| Location: | LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, US |
| Web Views: | 26 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Delivering peace during a time of loss, by SFC Amanda Johnson, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
