‘The World Stopped’ When COVID-19 Killed This 28-Year-Old Houston Doc

As COVID-19 deaths in the United States approached 200,000, the toll among health-care workers came to include a 28-year-old doctor who had gone about with a toy stethoscope as a youngster in upstate New York.

Dr. Adeline Fagan had grown up to become an OB-GYN resident at HCA Healthcare in Houston. A photo shows her in scrubs, holding a swaddled newborn. She has the incandescent smile of someone who could not think of anything better to do than to bring new life into the world.

But with the arrival of a pandemic, she sometimes delivered babies whose mothers were infected. And as the virus spiked in Texas, she was assigned to long shifts triaging and treating COVID-19 patients in the emergency room.