Jason Dickert was diagnosed with COVID-19 on Aug. 16. He died on Sept. 16.
His is one of hundreds of deaths that have been recorded at the Buncombe County Register of Deeds Drew Reisinger's office, which continues to chronicle COVID-19 deaths as the rest of the county hopes to move past the pandemic.
Their families break down in his office. Tensions reach boiling points. And the deaths keep coming.
It's enough for Reisinger to feel like he's living in two different realities: the one in his office chronicling the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic and another in the community where safety precautions are often ignored.
"As we continue to see death records coming in for young people, for people of all sectors of the community, I strongly advise my friends and family to get vaccinated," he said. "And as we're going back into the holidays right now, we've got to make sure everyone takes this seriously."
Memorial services for Jason Dickert, a 48-year-old Murphy High School band director, were held in his hometown of Greenville, S.C., and in Murphy, his wife Amy Dickert, 46, said.
"The thing that came up over and over again was how much he helped people when they needed it, whether financially, or they needed a place to stay, he’d take them to the doctor,” Amy Dickert said. “Very selfless.”
This Thanksgiving, he wasn’t there to cut the turkey. Preparing for a tough holiday without Jason, Amy Dickert said he was always the life of the party, always one to engage in conversation and trying to get a laugh.
She remembers a wonderful, outgoing man who held his relationship with Jesus paramount and who dedicated his life to music, a history buff who was also like a big kid in ways, keeping a collection of Batmobiles.
“Music was everything to him,” Dickert said.
She said he could play every instrument, but not one to blend in with the crowd, his main instrument was the mellophone.
He was drum major at his high school in Greenville, where he played in the Greenville Youth Orchestra as a teenager, she said, and when he went to Mars Hill College in the 1990s, was drum major there too.
A national champion marching with Carolina Crown, he also marched with The Spirit of Atlanta, whose rendition of Amazing Grace was one of the most amazing things he ever heard, Amy Dickert said.
He didn’t graduate from Mars Hill in the 1990s, instead heading back to Greenville where he worked in law enforcement for several agencies, she said.
But he went back to chase his dream and graduated with a music degree from Mars Hill in 2015.
And in a turn of fate, one of Amy’s friends called in late summer 2016 to let them know the previous Murphy band director had resigned the week before band camp.
Jason Dickert interviewed and got the job.
Many marching bands do two or three competitions per year, but Jason would take his students to as many as six a year, Amy Dickert said, including one year when he took them to competitions in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia.
One year, he did two in one day, one in North Carolina and one in South Carolina, she said.
“And he would always just try to make sure that the kids would get to go to the mall, and do stuff they’d normally not get to do up here,” Amy Dickert said.
COVID-19 cut that career short, and unfortunately, stories like his aren’t unique.
More than one death every day
His death certificate is one of more than 800 processed through the Buncombe County Register of Deeds office listing COVID-19 or related complications, like COVID-19 pneumonia and acute respiratory failure among causes of death.
Those records show that COVID-19 has been claiming lives in Buncombe County for 20 months.
The two most recent death records, which came into Reisinger's office Nov. 29, were for two Buncombe County natives who celebrated 55 years of marriage in October.
They died just a few hours apart on Nov. 22.
George Lloyd Lamb, 81, was the first county resident to die of COVID-19 on March 28, 2020 just a few weeks after the first reported case in the county.
Since then, the pandemic that's killed more than 776,000 Americans has taken its tragic toll on the county, claiming hundreds of lives.
Brianna Justus was a 31-year-old mother who died shortly after delivering a child via emergency C-section.
Reagan Henry, 39, was a beloved father, son and caregiver. He died June 23 at Mission Hospital, on the day visitor restrictions relaxed enough to allow his brother to be with him when it happened.
Glenn and Evelyn Bannerman, 93 and 92, respectively, were childhood sweethearts who died 17 days apart after 72 years of marriage.
And as the pandemic continues to take its toll, the Register of Deeds office catalogs each one, from the 23-year-old CNA to the 102-year-old pianist.
Total, Drew Reisinger's office has issued 812 death certificates for people who have died from COVID-19 as of Nov. 29, around half of whom were Buncombe County residents. Others died while receiving medical care in the county.
1 year, 301 deaths: Those we've lost to COVID-19 in Buncombe County
As home to Mission Hospital, Buncombe County's death numbers are always higher than just county residents, Reisinger said.
Jason Dickert's COVID-19 illness started mildly enough for the first six days or so, with a little cough until he began developing a fever over the weekend, with his doctor prescribing an alternating regimen of ibuprofen and Tylenol that Monday, Amy Dickert said.
They ended up going to the emergency room Aug. 25, she said, about 3:30 a.m. after his oxygen levels dropped and he began having trouble breathing.
He was transferred to Mission on Sept. 5, after an 11-day stay in the hospital in Murphy. Doctors there thought he had a heart attack.
He died after 11 days at Mission, where he sought more advanced care.
Reisinger said his office is processing more death certificates than any Buncombe Register of Deeds before him, with the highest death rate in the history of the county, thanks to one obvious factor: COVID-19.
"There aren't other things in the community that cause that many deaths," he said. "Even at the peak of the opioid epidemic, we were not seeing those numbers."
According to the Department of Health and Human Services, cancer and heart disease lead the state in cause of death.
In Buncombe County in 2019, heart disease, which includes coronary heart disease, heart failure and arrhythmias, killed 572 people, and all types of cancer killed 505.
Data from Reisinger's office shows that since Jan. 1, 2021, 492 people have died COVID-19-related deaths in Buncombe County.
According to NCDHHS, 437 Buncombe County residents have died due to COVID-19, at least 412 were Reisinger's records through Nov. 29, 172 in 2020 and at least 240 in 2021.
Records show that since the first COVID-19-related death was recorded in Buncombe County March 7, 2020, an average of more than nine people have died every week in Buncombe County from complications related to the virus.
'Not just a number'
"There's just this elevated tension," Reisinger said. "(The pandemic) has been going on so long and people are exhausted from it."
There's an increased need for services right now too, Reisinger said, as all the other cogs of government continue to turn, with more marriages and more real estate transactions than last year, all while more people are dying.
"My staff and I realized we've got to give more grace and more compassion," he said. "Specifically, folks we're dealing with have lost loved ones and (we) can't imagine what they're going through."
'We're running out of ambulances': COVID-19 leaves 51 dead in Buncombe County in August
Early on in the pandemic, deaths were mostly confined to the elderly, he said, something that's drastically changed in the past year, especially with the onset of the more contagious delta variant.
The average age of the first 100 people to die of COVID-19 in Buncombe County is 76. For the most recent 100 on record, it's 66. Total, among all 804 deaths, the average age is around 74.
“My heart continues to break for the people who I’ve spoken to,” Reisinger said. “They lost loved ones who were healthy, and this thing took them by surprise. I’ve talked to a lot of grieving family members trying to close out this chapter of their lives, and they didn’t expect to bury their kid.”
Of those who have died in the county, seven were in their 20s, five were in their 30s, 15 were in their 40s and more than 200 were younger than 65, while 117 were at least 90.
"We've seen too many death records come through for people who are under the age of 65 whose only underlying condition was that they had COVID-19," Reisinger said.
January 2021 has been the deadliest month of the pandemic in Buncombe County, with 151 deaths recorded, when COVID-19 claimed almost five people every day.
On three separate days that month, 10 people died from the virus.
"Going into the holidays, we need to be really careful, and make vaccination a priority before visiting family, especially our elderly loved ones," he said.
More: Beloved Deerfield nursing home employee 1st caregiver in WNC to die of COVID-19
It's the same message coming from public health officials ahead of the holiday season, including Public Health Director Stacie Saunders, who noted that as of Nov. 15, 431 county residents had died from COVID-19.
"It's not just a number, each one of those is a person who was loved by others, and cherished by them," she said.
They were factory line workers, truck drivers, civil servants, farmers, ministers, engineers, students, writers, artists and musicians, death records show.
They were home makers and front-line workers: teachers, doctors, nurses, servers, cashiers, firefighters, members of law enforcement and the military.
At least 170 were veterans, serving in Korea, Vietnam and World War II, according to obituaries.
They were from Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, Ohio, even as far away as Wisconsin and Washington and from all over Western North Carolina.
They were Black, white, Native American, Hispanic, Korean, even Native Hawaiian, Moldovan and Micronesian.
Dozens died at home, dozens more at long-term care facilities, hospice centers and at Charles George VA Medical Center. More than 470 have died at Mission Hospital.
'Living in two different realities'
As mask mandates come and go and life inches back toward normal, the constant stream of death records passing through his office has given Reisinger a unique perspective on the pandemic.
"It's like living in two different realities," Reisinger said, of seeing people in the community ignoring safety measures like the county's face covering mandate that runs through Nov. 29.
If folks had the vantage point of him and his staff, who catalog these COVID-19 deaths day after day, "They would absolutely want to wear a mask the next time they walk into a grocery store," he said.
Pandemic reporting: 'Discernable increase' in Buncombe's COVID-19 cases before holiday; mask mandate in limbo
Dickert too shared frustrations, speaking of inconsistent government mandates.
“There’s a lot of anger,” Dickert said. As a registered nurse in the Cherokee County School District, she says she’s been dealing with the pandemic for a couple years now.
She is vaccinated, and urges people to get vaccinated if they choose to, and especially to seek treatment as soon as possible if they do contract the virus.
Reisinger said he felt like everyone could take a sigh of relief, after he and his wife became fully vaccinated. Now that his son has been able to get his first shot too, he feels the community is finally on the path out of the pandemic.
While rising vaccination rates are giving health officials hope that this holiday season won't bring another steep increase in COVID-19 transmission even as county trends have stopped declining, and are headed back up instead.
In her job, too, Dickert said the focus has been strongly on prevention of COVID-19.
"Which is great, but getting that treatment, early treatment, is so important," she said. "And I feel like if we had been able to do that, things might have turned out differently. (I) encourage everybody to please get early treatment."
Derek Lacey covers health care, growth and development for the Asheville Citizen Times. Reach him at DLacey@gannett.com or 828-417-4842 and find him on Twitter @DerekAVL.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Buncombe County records show more than 1 COVID-19 death every day
