Why not throw the kitchen sink at this virus?Īs long as the patients keep coming, there will be someone to care. As Bernie Sanders and I have outlined, and he has proposed, let’s use our productive capacity to have masks for all. By closing all the hotspots – restaurants, bars, churches and the like – and instituting universal mask-wearing, we can save so many lives. As much of a challenge as Covid-19 is, as many lives as it has cost, we know that we can virtually eliminate the virus any time we decide to, and as other nations have done, in just a matter of weeks. I was the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Barack Obama. Let’s not ask more medical professionals to pay the price we don’t need to pay The degree to which they were abandoned is.
The degree to which they fought for our lives is nothing new. The database reveals how often a simple lack of very basic gear is implicated in so many deaths. The first known emergency room physician to die in the US, Frank Gabrin, sent the following text message to a friend: “Don’t have any PPE that has not been used.” He passed away only four days after developing symptoms, telling his husband in his final moments, “Baby, I can’t breathe.”
The database reveals that many of the healthcare victims were people of color, reflecting the toll of the virus in the nation at large.Įven so, when you enter a room day in, day out with a mask that you were supposed to replace last week, your race or your age or your healthiness are less of a defense.
And a number were under the age of 30, like Joshua Obra, 29, who worked in a nursing home with his younger sister and was adored by co-workers for always thinking of them, bringing them boba on busy days. The median age of the confirmed victims in the database is only 57. The caring professions have been thrust into a war zone. These are names that our nation must know. Debbie Accad was one of tens of thousands of Filipino nurses who moved to the US, and cared for US veterans for decades. One internal medicine physician, Alex Hsu, used to talk at the Thanksgiving dinner table for at least 10 minutes about how grateful he was to be in America. Some were immigrants who learned English at night while they got their nursing licenses in this country of possibility. Valeria Viveros, only 20 years old, would bring homemade ceviche for her patients, but fell sick just before an outbreak was reported at her nursing home. Two weeks after noticing he was unable to taste his lunch, Montgomery experienced intense chest pain, and soon declined. Adiel Montgomery spoke up about the lack of personal protective equipment for hospital security guards, because he was one himself. Nursing assistant Elva Graveline liked to bring shampoo from home to wash her patients’ hair – she died amid concerns she was forced to reuse personal protective equipment (PPE). This is the most comprehensive count of US healthcare worker deaths to date – and includes the names and faces of the deceased. They are investigating over 900 deaths, and have so far confirmed some 170 of the cases and profiled the victims. So the Guardian and Kaiser Health News have built a public database of the lives of the doctors, nurses, EMTs, medical technicians, social workers, cleaners and other members of hospital and nursing home staff working on the Covid-19 frontlines that we lost.
The scale of the loss of US healthcare workers in the coronavirus pandemic is hard to imagine.
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