I almost don't want to explain cause it's ridiculous, but when you get COVID and it gets to the point where you can't take care of yourself, you go to the ER, where they, the doctors and nurses, are already dealing with the million other cases that have nothing to do with COVID (broken limbs, heart failure, pneumonia, aneurysms, drug overdoses, the list goes ON). Add a pandemic to the shit show, and you can guess the rest. As the COVID patient sits in the ER, doctors and nurses have to assess how bad your case is. Every nurse that comes to your bedside is gowned up head to toe, usually wearing double masks and a face shield so they themselves don't get COVID from you or all the other patients that have COVID. If you are one of the unlucky ones and all the equipment in the ER can't save you, they ship you to the ICU. ICU stands for intensive care unit. Most cases end up on a ventilator and the patient isn't even awake. That ventilator machine is pretty much the only thing keeping you alive. As a patient, you're lying there in the ICU for I think an average of 2 weeks. During that time, you're just slowly dying, and every nurse and doctor that has helped you 24 hours a day, has to watch you die. Then they put you in a body bag, and bring the next sick patient in.
Also if you didn't know, at the beginning of this pandemic, if you were sent to the ICU with COVID, you were almost certainly a dead man. But yes still to this day, the ICU is where nearly all 600+ thousand unlucky American COVID patients took their last breath.
Maybe just a little draining mentally.
