Nurses: We Need Protective Gear Now |

[bhaigan]

Hospital clinicians get into their protective equipment before testing patients for the coronavirus, Covid-19 at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Massachusetts. One Pennsylvania nurse says her hospital is down to only 100 N95 masks.

When registered nurse Charnai Prefontaine arrived Thursday for her shift at the intensive care unit of an Illinois hospital that’s treating three confirmed COVID-19 cases, she was greeted with unwelcome news: They were completely out of N95 masks in her size, for the first time in her seven-year career. “I’ve never had anything like that happen before,” she says.

Along with the confirmed coronavirus patients, Prefontaine’s hospital has numerous suspected cases awaiting test results, and the hospital just this week changed its policy on suspected cases. Previously, nurses and doctors were required to use airborne protection, which would mandate the N95 masks. Now, the standard has been lowered to droplet protection — regular, non-filtering surgical masks, which put only a barrier of cloth between them and the virus. Nurses at Prefontaine’s hospital (she and other nurses who spoke for this story asked for their hospitals not to be named) were upset to hear about the change, suspecting it has a lot more to do with equipment availability than science. As it happens, Prefontaine is allergic to those standard surgical masks, so she has already been in close contact with potential COVID-19 patients while wearing an N95 mask in the wrong size.

RELATED
NEW YORK, NY - JANUARY 20:  James Taylor performs onstage during The Nearness Of You Benefit Concert at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on January 20, 2015 in New York City.  (Photo by Ilya S. Savenok/Getty Images)
James Taylor Donates $1 Million to Boston Hospital for Coronavirus Relief
Music Startup Sofar Sounds Will Pay Artists For Canceled Shows
Across the country, as doctors and nurses prepare for — or already face — a surge of COVID-19 patients, health care workers are seeing unprecedented shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE). They are begging the government, private companies, and hospital management for help. “My day starts out every morning with nurses describing to me how they are being refused the N95s and having to take care of [COVID-19] positive patients,” says Bonnie Castillo, a registered nurse and executive director of National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union. “Nurses are being handed a surgical mask, even being asked to reuse a surgical mask. It’s outrageous. What I keep hearing nurses tell me is, ‘We feel like we are just a calculated risk. We’re expendable. We’re fodder. They expect us to go in there with nothing.’ But this is a calling for them, and they are compelled to go to work.”

The concern goes well beyond the obvious and urgent moral obligation to protect the health of doctors and nurses, along with their families and friends. If significant numbers of healthcare workers get sick, as has happened in Italy and elsewhere, it could have catastrophic consequences, affecting hospitals’ ability to care for what is anticipated to be an already overwhelming flood of COVID-19 sufferers, not to mention patients who need help for other problems, from cancer to accidents. “It’s completely frightening and crazy,” says Marcia Santini, a registered nurse in the emergency department of a large hospital system in Los Angeles, where gowns and goggles have already run out and N95 masks are running low. “If we do not protect our healthcare workers on the front line, and anybody that has to take care of COVID-19 patients, we are going to have a major healthcare crisis. Your hospitals, they’re gonna crumble.” Doctors and nurses are already being exposed to the virus: In the two facilities in Santini’s health care system, she says, over 100 health care workers are already on medical leave due to possible COVID-19 infection.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) lowered its guidelines for health care workers, suggesting it’s acceptable to use surgical masks instead of N95s. “There’s a lot of distrust for the CDC right now on the part of registered nurses,” says Katy Roemer, a registered nurse and vice president for National Nurses United. “CDC downgraded the criteria because of a shortage of equipment, not based on the science of how this virus is transmitted or the precautionary principle.” This week, the CDC went further, in a new guidance posted on its web site: “In settings where face masks are not available, [health care provides] might use homemade masks (e.g., bandana, scarf) for care of patients with COVID-19 as a last resort,” while noting that those masks “are not considered PPE, since their capability to protect [health care providers] is unknown.”

[perugu_vada]

Thaatha ki tweet chesthe best  ok we are on to it ani odilesthadu ani bhayam emo ? developed country antaaru .. anni bayata nunche ochedi .. ilanti global crisis osthe anni muuskoni undatame veella paristhithi