Five years ago this month, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, and stay-at-home orders started fanning out across the nation.
“Effective Monday, March 16, the University is strongly encouraging remote work,” wrote then Provost Wendell Pritchett Gr’97 and Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli W’85 in a March 13, 2020, message to Penn faculty and staff.
Like many frontline workers throughout the world, Penn Medicine physicians and staff had to find a way to connect and keep hospitals running as they treated an influx of patients with COVID-19.
John Hansen-Flaschen GM’82, the Paul F. Harron Jr. Family Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine, was working with a team devoted to procuring mechanical ventilators at the time. Also a photographer, he captured this moment in history by photographing colleagues he “met” with on his home computer. What resulted was this collection of portraits he calls Medical Intensivists (COVID-19).
“These photographs show physicians conferring with one another from home kitchen tables, bedrooms and sunrooms, hotel rooms, and quieter corners of open hospital spaces,” he writes in an introduction to the online exhibit.
“In these photographic portraits of friends and colleagues, I see the vulnerability that invariably accompanies mastery. I see fortitude, the strength of mind and moral sense of duty that enable well-prepared people to encounter danger with courage and grace.” —NP
