SALINAS, Calif. – She’s 76 years old but nurse practitioner Sigrid Stokes is in no mood to retire. Stokes is too busy working to save lives during a deadly pandemic, just as her mother did more than a century ago.
While the late Kristine Berg Mueller tended to those stricken by the deadly flu pandemic that swept around the world in 1918, Stokes is giving vaccinations to health care workers battling the coronavirus.
Mueller was a 14-year-old student in her native Norway when the flu pandemic hit. It eventually killed an estimated 50 million people, including some 675,000 in the United States, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention. “And so she and a friend volunteered at the local hospital to help out in whatever way