One of the many cruelties inflicted by the coronavirus is that many of its victims have died alone in sterile hospital rooms, with health care workers calling family members who can’t be at their bedsides.

A month into the pandemic, Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center has come up with a system for allowing in-person visits so that relatives can say goodbye to their loved ones in the flesh.

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Influxes of COVID-19 patients have created many challenges for hospitals across the country, as hospital workers try to balance caring for a patient with stopping the spread of a highly contagious disease. Coronavirus patients are treated in isolation, health care workers must limit their in-person contact with patients, and hospitals are turning away visitors to prevent treatment sites from becoming breeding grounds for the virus.

But as coronavirus has become more common in Louisiana hospitals, some are changing their approach to end-of-life care. In the early weeks of Baton Rouge’s outbreak — where 1,534 people have tested positive thus far — health care workers and palliative care specialists at Our Lady of the Lake would spend time calling and Facetiming patients’ family members so that they might feel less alone.

But for patients who would never make it home, relatives often never got the chance to say goodbye in person. In some cases, coronavirus patients declined so rapidly that their family members didn’t even receive phone calls in time.

“We realized there’s really no way to replace the ability of a family member to be at the bedside when someone is in their final minutes and hours,” said Dr. Mary Raven, a palliative care physician for Our Lady of the Lake.

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It often fell to Raven to first tell a family that their loved one looked unlikely to survive, and secondly, to call or videoconference a family so that they could say goodbye over the phone. But now, family members should be able to say goodbye in the flesh in most cases.

Over the past week, Heart of Hospice also opened a unit for dying coronavirus patients inside of Metairie's East Jefferson General Hospital that family members will also be able to visit.

Our Lady of the Lake is allowing two family members to visit terminal patients for 30 minutes. Family visitors are screened for fever and other symptoms when they enter the hospital, and they’re required to wear masks, gloves and gowns, provided by the hospital.

For family members who can’t make it before a loved one dies, they can visit within one hour of a patient’s death if the patient was in an intensive care unit, or two hours of death if the patient was in a medical/surgical unit.

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The same rules will apply for patients dying in the hospital of other ailments, though family members in those instances will not have to wear protective equipment.

“Really, they’re just so grateful to have the opportunity to stand close, hold a hand, touch a face,” Raven said. “It’s just the closeness that can’t be duplicated with technology.”

Several health care workers have spoken out in recent weeks about the difficulty of comforting patients whose family members can't be with them at the end of their lives. Morgan Babin, a nurse working with coronavirus patients at Our Lady of the Lake, recently explained how much it pained her to take care of an elderly patient who declined to be put on a ventilator and who couldn’t seem to get comfortable, regardless of the care Babin gave her.

Babin prayed with the patient when her family members couldn’t be there as she slipped away.

“It was an honor and a privilege for me, and I’ll never forget her,” Babin told an Advocate | Times-Picayune reporter at the hospital.

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Raven said coronavirus patients now receiving end-of-life visits from family include those who opted against being intubated and those who have been on ventilators but haven't improved. Dina Dent, Our Lady of the Lake’s vice president of nursing, said the visits give family members the chance to see what kind of environment their loved ones have been in and to meet the staffers who have been treating them.

Some aspects of end-of-life care remain different because of coronavirus. Raven — who used to meet with families for an hour at a time around a conference table to discuss a prognosis — said she still must have such conversations over the phone.

And for patients on their deathbeds hoping for last rites and the anointing of the sick sacrament, priests and chaplains are administering them from afar rather than anointing a forehead with oil as they normally would, said Coletta Barrett, Our Lady of the Lake’s vice president of mission.

“Only a priest can take someone’s confession or do anointing of the sick, but in extraordinary times, there are other ways that the church allows that to happen,” Barrett said.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to explain that Heart of Hospice is operating the new hospice unit for coronavirus patients inside of East Jefferson General Hospital.