How One COVID-19 Nurse Navigates Anti-Mask Sentiment

Producer Ryan Kellman and journalist Nathan Rott of NPR present Isabel Seliger’s comic “How One COVID-19 Nurse Navigates Anti-Mask Sentiment,” which uses graphic narrative techniques to depict the lived experience of an ICU nurse during the pandemic. The comic visualizes Agnes Boisvert’s sensory overload, fear of infection, and emotional exhaustion through sequential art, integrating text and image to render complex psychological states. It documents the tension between healthcare workers’ frontline realities and public anti-mask protests, illustrating how social conflict shaped nurses’ emotional labor. The form foregrounds alarm fatigue and moral distress, making visible aspects of pandemic healthcare work that are difficult to convey in prose or statistics.

This comic directly contributes to COVID-19 storytelling by offering an embodied, visual account of healthcare worker burnout and the social resistance they confronted, thus expanding narrative modes to include graphic testimony of pandemic trauma. Through the integration of image and text, it creates an immediate, affective experience that reveals the psychological and ethical challenges faced by ICU nurses, diversifying how pandemic narratives represent frontline labor and emotional strain.