After losing her mother, Mary Castro, during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rosie Davis has found healing and community in honoring her and others.
Every March since 2021, Davis has collected thousands of photos and yellow hearts bearing the names of people from all over the world who have died from COVID. Her exhibit, Yellow Heart Memorial, is now on display in the lobby of the Irving Archives and Museum.
“This has been my way of ... humanizing them and not letting them go into history as just a number because they’re grandmothers, grandfathers, their parents, friends, neighbors, aunts, uncles,” Davis said. “They meant the world to somebody, to a family.”
For Davis, who was unable to say goodbye to her mother or bury her as planned, the exhibit offers her a way to honor Castro and others who died during a pandemic that left friends and families without avenues to process their grief.
More than 1.2 million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 since 2020 – a number that researchers say may not full capture the virus’ toll. Similarly hard to measure, around 18 million adults, or 6% of the population, live with long COVID. Despite burgeoning research, there is still not a cure.
Five years after the pandemic started in the U.S., the effects remain, from a strain on hospital systems to distrust in public health experts and vaccinations.
Davis said that's made it hard for people to access resources or move on.
“What are we supposed to do with our grief? How are we supposed to handle this?” she said. “I don’t feel like we’ve moved forward from the pandemic.”
Misinformation, disinformation, cut funding
Josh and Amanda Smith’s jobs in the entertainment industry meant their livelihoods depended on returning to work – and doing so vaccinated.
During the beginning of the pandemic, the couple created the Facebook group DFW Corona Connection to connect friends and family to each other and COVID-19. Soon after, membership boomed – and so did the volume of posts. Both saw a shift when the vaccine became available.
“It really did divide into two factions, and we’re [...] still living in that space today as we speak,” Amanda Smith said.
Vaccine hesitancy rose during the pandemic and in the years that followed, along with overall distrust in public health institutions. In 2023 Texas banned private businesses from enforcing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and a slate of bills now before state lawmakers would further weaken vaccine mandates as a measles outbreak in West Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico has sickened more than 300 people – most of them unvaccinated.
“All of these things, there’s misinformation surrounding it has led us to where we are here now,” Amanda Smith said. “Why are we having conversations about measles? Why am I having a conversation about polio?”
The National Institutes of Health under President Donald Trump canceled more than 40 grants related to vaccine hesitancy, according to NPR. Officials with the NIH also urged scientists to remove references in grant applications to the mRNA vaccine technology used to develop COVID-19 vaccinations, according to the health policy nonprofit KFF.
Dr. Erin Carlson, director of graduate public health programs at the University of Texas at Arlington, said the pandemic highlighted the importance of widely available testing, as well as consistently funded research in immune systems and vaccine development.
She described the federal research cuts as “a gut punch” to science for both the U.S. and abroad.
“We will be less able to protect our families, will be less able to protect our country, will be less able to have the innovations that will help protect the world,” she said. “And a lot of it goes back to misinformation and disinformation.”
Carlson said patients are more likely to trust their family physicians over others, making education and relationship building important, as well as building relationships within different communities.
“We as public health practitioners have got to ask people, what about this vaccine scares you and listen because we have to know how to address the concerns and the fears of a particular prevention or treatment method if we are really going to be able to communicate it effectively,” Carlson said.
"Science always wins,” she said, but unnecessary public funding cuts, misinformation and disinformation will lead to unnecessary hospitalizations and deaths.
“This is going to be a very difficult time,” she said. “This is not going to get under control easily, but it will eventually get under control."
Community, rebuilding trust take priority
Carlson said for future pandemics, communities will have to come together as they did in the early days of COVID-19 cases, when people pooled resources and supported neighbors through uncertain times.
“If we are going to fight another highly transmissible, highly virulent pandemic, we will have to get back together,” she said.
Steve Love of the Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council said the pandemic led to greater collaborations among local hospital officials.
“When some parts of the country were experiencing COVID two and three weeks ahead of us, it was amazing to me how some of the clinical people, especially physicians, contacted their colleagues in other parts of the country to kind of get a head start on some of the things we might see and what we might experience,” he said.
That collaboration has continued: Agencies have reorganized to address an IV fluids shortage caused by flooding at a North Carolina manufacturing plant. Hospitals are also coordinating in case measles cases associated with the West Texas outbreak appear in North Texas.
Carrie Kroll, senior vice president of advocacy and public policy at the Texas Hospital Association, said her organization has focused on addressing violence towards public health employees and educating the public about preventative efforts.
“I want the public to remember that while we may not be the health care heroes that everybody saw during the pandemic, we remain very committed to the communities we’re in and that we continue to be mindful of our goal to serve patients,” she said.
Meanwhile, Rosie Davis, whose Yellow Hearts Memorial is on display through the end of March, wants to see a national monument for people who have died of COVID-19. Permanent monuments are in the works or complete in Texas; Missouri; and California.
“It gives us as families the reassurance that our loved ones are forever going to be honored,” she said, “and they’re never going to be forgotten.”
Got a tip? Email Kailey Broussard at kbroussard@kera.org.
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