Medical personnel at the forefront of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States are quitting over alleged shortage of protective gears and amenities.
Imaris Vera, who lives in Chicago, claims her manager told her she wasn’t allowed to wear a protective mask, even when caring for a COVID-19 patients in an ICU unit that had been converted to a designated COVID unit.
Vera, who has more than three years of experience working in trauma, post-operative, cardiac, medical, surgical, and full-time critical nursing care, felt that she had no option but to quit her job.
She explained in an emotional Instagram video, uploaded on March 30, that she was trying to keep herself safe and looking out for “family members who have pre-existing conditions” because “they wouldn’t get a ventilator” if they contracted COVID-19 from her.
“I had my own N95 mask,” Vera says in the video. “I told my manager I understand we’re short on supplies. But let me protect myself. Let me feel safe. I have family that I have to come home to. And the way things are looking, this isn’t going to get any better. America is not prepared. And nurses are not being protected.”
Vera alleges that her manager told her, “We’ve kept up with the CDC and it is only when the COVID patient has any aerosol type treatments like a ventilator, nasal cannula, nebulizer etc. that it’s airborne… otherwise it’s droplet…”
She also claims that nurses who are treating COVID-19 patients aren’t wearing masks in the hallways of the hospital where she worked when giving reports, and that they have been instructed to reapply and reuse masks stored in brown paper bags after treating those patients.
Sadly, Vera’s experience is common.
A nurse in Missouri resigned after being told she couldn’t wear an N95 mask she’d bought herself.
Not only are health care workers not getting the protection they need, but some are also being silenced by their employers.
In California, a nurses union said a hospital consortium in the state threatened to fire nurses who wore their own masks to treat COVID-19 patients on the grounds of “insubordination.”
But more and more frontline workers are speaking out.
On April 2, nurses rallied at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, the US epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, demanding N95 masks, gowns, and other essential PPE.
“I am a helper,” one nurse said. “But now I am a helper who needs help.”
More than 300,000 people have been infected by the coronavirus in the US with nearly 10,000 deaths.
