The First Wave

Even though I've read the stories of healthcare workers and the horrors they've endured during the pandemic, it's difficult to truly understand the reality of the past two years. This documentary helped me gain more understanding of what has been happening in our hospitals, which is especially important right now - when everyone is feeling worn out and tired of this pandemic. It was difficult to watch the patients, their families, nurses, and doctors suffer physically and emotionally, but the documentary left me feeling hopeful and determined to help where I can.

As a nurse who worked in the icu this is the most accurate documentary I've seen. I hesitated to watch it since I'm trying to work through it all still. When she was explaining the frustrations of not being able to actually help anyone it really hit home. In the beginning patients would get better and we would tell their families and give them hope because we didn't know better yet. Then they would suddenly crash and code. It was completely soul crushing to not be able to help these people who were suffering. Everyone was calling us heroes but we were barely saving anyone early on. I felt like such a failure. Also how attached we get to our patients, we say we try to separate it but I think we all had those that we got close to, them and their families, who hit us harder when they passed. The first thing we would do when walking in the door is check and see if they are still alive. I'm glad this gives a glimpse of what it was like for both the patients and staff. Also glad PT's got airtime, those that were lucky enough to survive had a long road ahead of them. Wish they had also focused on a RT, they are so crucial always but especially during covid. I think it was very well done overall.

I watched the film via streaming on the Eventive app on Apple TV. The first moments of the documentary was hard to watch. Several times I considered turning the TV off and not watching it. You, the viewer, are basically like the fly on the wall where interns and nurses are constantly called to rooms in ICU to assist dying patients trying by a long shot to rescue them from sure death either through CPR or electro heart shocks before deciding their pulses are not coming back and they are declared dead. Many times the interns and nurses lose it and get very emotional when they are unable to save lives. You actually see one body getting zipped in a body bag, stored in a refrigerated truck and buried in a mass grave. Later on, the movie focuses on three specific people. An intern and two severely ill Covid-19 patients in ICU on ventilators. One is a school security officer for the NYPD, the other one of the hospital's nurses who is pregnant who caught covid from her patients. While in ICU, she gave birth by C-section. The film also focuses on both their families and how they are coping. Throughout the film it is hard to predict if either of them would survive. I predict this film will be a strong candidate for an Oscar for Best Documentary.

I watched this trying to understand better the facts of Covid and it unfolding since I only really heard stories from the news. This did an okayish job showing that as it mostly pertains to 3-6 patients examined in the whole film. Oddly they threw in a racial component to the film that seems unrelated and disjointed (they do mention that apparently covid affected minorities more than white people but that's unrelated to the BLM stuff they have later in the film).

Overall I had more empathy for nurses and what they went through so I'd say that's probably the message overall that resonated with me.

We as a society failed here massively. This all could have been avoided if we would have gone into a strict globally coordinated lock-down as soon as the first cases started showing up. I am glad that I was able to convince my parents to isolate, move to our remote condo, and stay away from everybody until they finally got vaccinated.

That being said, those who down-vote this documentary and call it fake, are exactly the same people who have been downplaying the pandemic and making it much worse for everybody else. They should be ashamed of themselves instead of continuing with their bull.

Lastly I would like to express my condolences to everybody who lost a loved one to this disease, and thank everybody who was involved into saving people's lives despite all the struggle and disbelief about how some patients got sick.

It's hard to watsch because it's a documentary about just the first wave. We all had multiple of those. And many less fortunate countries got much worse outcomes. And it's still not over as of now.