It’s not just New York that’s feeling the pressure. Hospitals across the country are seeing a surge of patients, a shortage of personal protective equipment such as masks and gowns, and health care workers who feel that they, their families and their patients are being put at risk.Several nurses around the country also spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity, also fearing they could lose their jobs.
One ER nurse in Virginia described her hospital as “exceptionally chaotic,” with an emergency department where potential Covid-19 patients were sitting next to patients with other health conditions.”You have an elderly couple that is having chest pain sitting right next to someone who has a cough and flu,” she said. “I think that’s extremely reckless.”She said she hadn’t hugged her daughter since the outbreak started, for fear she may pass anything on to her.Another nurse in Georgia said she was repeatedly denied testing, even as her own symptoms worsened over the course of a week. The nurse, who had cared for several patients who died of pneumonia but were never tested for Covid-19, was finally tested Tuesday — the same day she was admitted to the hospital and put in isolation.”It was not until this morning that I could finally be tested,” she said as she gasped for breath between heavy coughs. “It is insane. And it’s infuriating. You feel you have to scream to even be heard.”Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, an ER nurse at Montefiore Medical Center and president of the New York State Nurses Association, said that “everybody is terrified” about becoming infected because many lack the proper protective gear, and many are being told to reuse the same mask between multiple patients.Sheridan-Gonzalez said she fears not having enough ventilators or staff to take care of everyone, but it hasn’t “hit that level yet” at her hospital.
Similarly, one New York City private hospital executive, who requested anonymity, told CNN that “many hospitals believe they are covered on ventilators. That doesn’t mean some are not.”Still, the shortage of personal protective equipment continues to impact his and other hospitals.For Sheridan-Gonzalez, the risk of becoming infected amid a shortage of masks and gowns is all too real.”We feel an obligation to take care of our patients. Everybody does. But we don’t want to become sick and we also don’t want to become carriers,” she said. “In my own hospital — and I don’t think it’s unique — we have a nurse who is on a ventilator right now who contracted the virus.”If the virus takes out health care workers, “it’s game over. It’s lights out,” Dr. Peter Hotez, professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, previously told CNN.”If we have multiple frontline health care workers, ER physicians, nurses go down in this epidemic — a situation where you have colleagues taking care of colleagues in the intensive care unit — there’s nothing more destabilizing for the United States.”