Meet the ICU staff, patients facing COVID-19 in Miami, and the director behind the series
Inside the COVID Unit: Battling the Coronavirus Pandemic in Miami is a five-part Miami Herald/McClatchy documentary series that tells the stories of front-line workers, their patients and their families as the coronavirus pandemic struck Florida in 2020.
At Jackson South Medical Center in Miami-Dade County, doctors and nurses shot video inside the COVID unit from April through October. At the same time, a Miami Herald/McClatchy visual journalist was allowed to film inside the COVID unit once and conducted extensive interviews outside the hospital to produce this searing portrait of how the people in one small public hospital coped in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.
Dr. Andrew Pastewski
Andrew Pastewski, 45, the ICU medical director at Jackson South, started treating COVID-19 patients in the earliest days of the pandemic. A critical care doctor and pulmonologist, he’d only been the ICU chief for about a month when the virus struck South Florida in 2020.
He agreed to start filming, with permission of Jackson, because he believes people outside the hospital walls needed to see how hard healthcare workers have been working to combat the deadly virus.
“The people at Jackson South are amazing at every level,” he said. “I wanted people to know that we fought hard every time.”
Pastewski knew he wanted to become a doctor from the age of 12, when he visited a hospital with his father, a surgeon, and realized how doctors can change people’s lives. In addition to practicing critical care and pulmonology, he also specializes in internal medicine and sleep disorders. Originally from Long Island, N.Y., he did his medical training in Brooklyn and moved to Miami-Dade County 14 years ago, where he lives with his wife, Melinda, and their two children.
Julio Valido
Julio Valido is a registered nurse who began working with COVID patients at Jackson South the first day that a patient with symptoms of the virus came through the doors. Valido, born and raised in Miami-Dade County, had been an EMT paramedic before he became a nurse. He said he chose to do that work in part because at 32, he was younger than some of the other nurses who might be at greater risk if they became infected.
“One hundred percent, I was there. I wanted to follow up with the patients and see how they were doing, all the different treatments we were trying, to see what was working,” he said. “I was talking to families and praying for a good outcome.”
He lives with his wife and three children in Miami-Dade.
Dianne Washington
Dianne Washington, originally from Detroit, has lived in Miami-Dade County since 1988. Before the pandemic, she lived with her son Derrick Benard Sharpley, a former inspector for Ford Motor Co., and her husband, Kenneth, a pastor in a local church, Cathedral of Prayer Ministries.
“They took care of each other and I took care of them,” she said.
Dianne and Kenneth met when they were teenagers at a church convention but didn’t see each other until many years later, after both were divorced. They married in 1988.
“From that day to the day he died, we were together,” she said.
Kenneth had served in the Army in Vietnam and had a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Florida International University, among other degrees. He had survived three bouts of cancer. Dianne, 70, has a master’s degree in mental health counseling.
Dianne continues to live in Miami-Dade, near another son and daughter-in-law and two children. The youngest, Alexis, was born the same day Dianne’s husband was hospitalized at Jackson South with COVID.
Reshma Kirpalani
Reshma Kirpalani is a 12-time Lone Star Emmy award-winning journalist. At the age of 3, she immigrated to South Florida from Paramaribo, Suriname, in South America, which is still her favorite place on Earth.
After attending the University of Miami, she began her journalism career at a community newspaper in Boca Raton. In 2012, she got her master’s degree in photojournalism at the University of Texas at Austin, and started as a part-time, night-shift visual journalist for the Austin American-Statesman. Kirpalani was the first visual journalist to win a Lone Star Emmy award for the Statesman. She went on to win 11 more regional Emmys for that newspaper.
Kirpalani joined McClatchy, the Miami Herald’s parent company, in 2018 as part of the four-person team that produced a real-time episodic documentary about the U.S. Senate race between Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz — the closest race in Texas in 40 years.
The pandemic brought her back to South Florida, where she helped the Miami Herald cover the impact of COVID-19, including historic levels of unemployment and high numbers of cruise ship deaths.
Inside the COVID Unit is Kirpalani’s directorial debut.
