In normal times, the ICU is a dreadful place.

Sickness lingers like a fog. You can feel it, sense it, even hear it—the machinery pumping, the alarms ringing, the nurses scrambling.

In pandemic times, the ICU is chilling. Death lives here.

Medical staff members wear green biohazard suits, face shields, latex gloves and shoe coverings. Strips of red tape—“ISOLATION,” they read—mark the windows and doors of individual rooms.

Behind each is a patient who cannot breathe on their own, kept alive by a ventilation machine that is connected to an invasive tube running down their windpipe and into the lungs. Each room is almost identical: a person, some on their stomachs and others on their backs, sedated and paralyzed, roughly a dozen patches…