Lives Cut Short: Remembering Health Care Workers In Their 20s Killed By COVID-19

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Siblings Jasmine and Josh Obra both tested positive for COVID-19 on the same day. Only one of them survived.

The Obra family

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The Obra family

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Angela Padula and Dennis Bradt became engaged in early February. On May 13, Bradt died of a heart attack as doctors tried to coax him off a ventilator.

Angela Padula

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Angela Padula

Angela Padula and Dennis Bradt became engaged in early February. On May 13, Bradt died of a heart attack as doctors tried to coax him off a ventilator.

Angela Padula

The couple wanted to save up for a few years for their wedding, but by early April, they had already purchased her engagement and wedding rings. Bradt, who had the sweeter tooth, had chosen a raspberry-swirl wedding cake.

After the pandemic hit, Bradt started showering when he got home from work. He and Padula wore masks when they went out, which was usually only for groceries or gas. They stopped visiting their immunocompromised parents.

On April 5, Bradt came down with a fever, stomach-bug symptoms and achiness, and went to the hospital. His COVID-19 test came back negative. Soon he couldn’t breathe. Another test proved positive. On April 16 he was put on a ventilator. In the process, he choked on his own vomit, which caused his lung to collapse.

Padula assumes Bradt was infected at work, and is unsure whether he had sufficient PPE. Conifer Park did not respond to queries, but according to local health authorities, 12 employees and six patients at the facility tested positive for COVID-19. Padula herself had symptoms so severe that she was taken to the emergency room in an ambulance.

She was not allowed to visit Bradt, and was quarantined alone at home, where she spent her 28th birthday, taking anxiety medication prescribed by her doctor.

On May 13, as doctors tried to coax Bradt off the ventilator, he suffered a heart attack, Padula says. She and Bradt’s mother were permitted to say goodbye to him. But «he was gone by the time we got there, Padula said in an interview. «He didn’t look like himself, swollen and festooned with tubes.

Today Padula is still sick. Pain in her arms, legs and back wakes her at night. She feels as though the virus has taken over her life.

«I have my days where it’s just too much to think about, she says. «I’ll see people getting engaged on Facebook — it makes me mad. I want to be happy for them, but it’s very difficult for me to be happy. We were planning on having kids in a couple years.

‘I feel like he’s with me’

Less than two months before Josh and Jasmine Obra fell ill, Josh posted two pictures to Instagram: One was a photo of a fireworks display at Disneyland; the other was a picture of himself in medical scrubs, wearing a face mask, giving the peace sign.

«Heeeeeyo! It’s been a minute, he wrote in the caption. «It’s been a tough month for all of us. He worked with a vulnerable population, he said, and «it’s just mentally exhausting thinking each night when I come home that I may be having symptoms the next day.

Even so, Josh was the kind of helpful, empathetic nurse who «makes things easier for everybody, says colleague Sarah Depayso. He knew how to talk to patients and was attuned to others’ stress levels. «We were so busy, and it was ‘I’ll buy you lunch, I’ll buy you dinner, I’ll buy you boba.'

It had been about 35 days since Disneyland closed its gates, Josh noted in his post. Josh’s photos — of the Sleeping Beauty castle framed by tabebuia blossoms, or of himself in an attention-grabbing Little Mermaid sweater — and corny jokes endeared him to thousands of followers on Instagram. «He had a way of capturing magic, says his friend Brandon Joseph. The pictures were joyful, like memories of childhood.

Josh’s last post was on June 10, announcing that Disneyland planned to reopen in July. At some point the virus had reached his nursing home, infecting 49 staff members and 120 residents and ultimately killing 14 people. Approximately 41% of all U.S. coronavirus deaths are linked to nursing homes, where frail people live in close quarters, according to The New York Times.

After taking the virus test on June 12, his health deteriorated. On June 15, he messaged Joseph that he couldn’t take a full breath of air without feeling like he was being knifed in the chest. On June 20, he texted that he was at the hospital and that he had a particularly bad case.

The final time Josh spoke with his family, before he was put on a ventilator, was on June 21. «On our last video call together, I was isolated in Anaheim, quarantined, and our parents were at home, Jasmine says. It was Father’s Day, «and I remembered crying and crying because this was the reality of what our family was.

Josh’s family was not permitted to visit him in the hospital, and he died on July 6.

By coincidence, Josh, like his grandparents, was buried in the same cemetery as Walt Disney — Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Before the funeral, Jasmine walked over to Disney’s grave, she says. «I was like, ‘Hi, Walt. I hope you and my brother found each other.'

Every night since he died, Jasmine has watched Southern California’s spectacular sunsets, the pinks and yellows that Josh kept returning to in his pictures. «And every time I feel like he’s with me. I look at the sky and sometimes I start talking to it, and I feel like I’m talking to my brother, and that he’s painting beautiful skies.

Alastair Gee is a reporter at The Guardian.

Melissa Bailey, Eli Cahan, Shoshana Dubnow and Anna Sirianni contributed to this report. This story is part of «Lost on the Frontline, an ongoing project by The Guardian and Kaiser Health News (KHN) that aims to document the lives of health care workers in the U.S. who die from COVID-19, and to investigate why so many are victims of the disease. If you have a colleague or loved one we should include, please share their story.