Nurses are our Neighbors. A Perspective on Arizona COVID-19.
This doctor worked for 251 days straight during the COVID-19 Pandemic. This viral picture is not beautiful. This picture is the sum total of the pain and abandonment of this pandemic.
“It’s taking a huge toll, not only on me. My nurses in the middle of the day, they will start crying, because they are getting so many patients, and it’s a never-ending story.” — Dr. Varon
Doctors, nurses, and health care professionals are our neighbors; they live next to us, they are our family and friends, they are people in our communities. As of September 28th, over 1,700 medical professionals have died from COVID-19, and this information is not being tracked by hospitals, meaning this is possibly a low estimate. They are not being tested on-site. They barely get sick time. No hazard pay. They work long hours. It’s time to stop saying they are brave and start asking how we failed them.
“You need to protect the nurses and all hospital workers so that we can care for you.We are your front line of defense and more importantly, and please listen, we are your only line of defense.” — Mary Turner, Maryland Nurses Association President
Arizona has just become the state with the highest rate of spread. Arizona is predicted to see continual upward trends in positivity.
In Arizona, there are shortages of staff as hospitals are forced to compete for contract labor. Banner Hospital, a large hospital branch in Arizona, says that a typical winter needs 1,000 extra nurses to survive the season, but with Covid-19 this winter, they will need double that. Ann-Marie Alameddin, president and CEO of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, says, “The number one limiting factor is staffing right now.”
“You can’t fight the air you have to breathe.”
Alanna Freij, a nurse at Banner Health, in Tucson, Arizona, says as she describing how the second COVID unit is not utilizing negative pressure rooms. Negative pressure rooms are an isolation technique used to prevent contamination and allow nurses a safer breathing environment, rather than air laden with infectious germs. She is worried nurses will start to go down with COVID due to this, decreasing the staffing on top of everything else. She says, on supplies, bed, and staff, “There is nothing left. We’re tripling patients.”
Things are bad. The Navajo Nation, which has been hit tremendously hard by this virus, has requested a Major Disaster Declaration from the state due to a shortage of medical supplies, health personnel, and hospital beds. 515 Arizonans on ventilators (as of 12/11). Bed in hospitals are filling up at 91%(as of 12/11), reaching capacity, but without staff for the beds, the capacity is actually lower. We are starting to see the results of Thanksgiving warnings ignored and the effect of winter on the spread of disease. And Christmas looms on the horizon.
Top medical leadership in Arizona has sent memos and letters to Governor Ducey and Director Christ, urging them to take action. While $60M more has been allocated, no other requests or plans to mitigate the COVID-19 crisis have been taken into consideration, which was the explicit request in these letters and memos. Let me repeat that, medical facilities are urging for help, and they have been ignored. (These letters can be read: Top Hospital Directors, NAU, UofA Covid-19 Modeling Team)
“If nothing is done, hospitals will be forced to decide who gets care and who does not.” — UofA COVID-19 Modeling Team
What happens when hospitals hit capacity? According to Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association and a former state health director: visitation restriction, transferring patients to different hospitals, some people who should be admitted will be sent home, people who should stay in the hospital will be sent home early, and finally, the hospital will start making decisions about who stays and lives, and who is turned away.
Dr. Cleavon Gilman, an emergency-medicine physician at YMRC who had been garnering attention on social media for journaling COVID response for months now, tweeted on Nov. 22nd, “Just got to work and was notified there are no more ICU beds in the state of Arizona.” He went on to detail the situation. Within a few days, he was asked to stop coming back into work — this sort of punishment of transparency is detrimental to Arizona.
“They told me it was because of the tweets and I couldn’t believe it because that was accurate information I posted to inform the citizens of Arizona. It is a grave injustice and it’s not just happening to me. Doctors everywhere are afraid to speak up.” — Gilman
Part of the way we support healthcare is remembering who failed us during this crisis, with half-way shutdowns, lack of financial support to struggling citizens, and actions that did not slow COVID while jeopardizing medical care professionals.
“However, if action is not immediately taken, then it risks a catastrophe on a scale of the worst natural disaster the state has ever experienced. It would be akin to facing a major forest fire without evacuation orders.” —UofA Covid-19 Modeling Team
“When people don’t wear masks or follow protocol, it says, I don’t believe you. I don’t care about you. I’m begging for any of you to care about us,” Freij said when asked what healthcare professionals in Arizona need right now from their communities.
When I asked her what else nurses need, she said, “I ask that you just care for your community through providing people with resources. For people that have family members in the hospital, offer to cook them a meal, offer to take care of their kids. When someone dies, they can’t have a funeral. Offer to do whatever you can. Decorate a Christmas tree.”
That’s what these nurses do. They take care of us, and that’s what she asked us to do for each other, but there was a somber tone under her words — there is nothing left that nurses can do for themselves and nothing we can do for them. Beyond simply, trying to slow this pandemic in any way we can.
There are small ways forward— in July 2020, in Tucson, Arizona, nurses at St. Mary’s Hospital and St. Joseph’s Hospital voted overwhelmingly to approve their first contract with the National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU), though I believe it had been in negotiation for two years. This is the first-ever RN union in Arizona. This is a step towards medical professionals being able to represent their needs and the needs of the people they take care of. Their contract calls for rests between 8-hour shifts, a voice for nurses on PPE and equipment, a committee to address patient care and nursing practice, staffing protection, and transparent wages.
I know it’s been hard for Americans — without stimulus checks, without enough small business relief, without rent and mortgage suspension, with evictions looming, with student loans resuming, and with millions of Americans without job-based health insurance due to this pandemic. I understand the anger of what a shutdown will do, but this anger is misdirected; nurses and at-risk populations should not be put in harm’s way — the government should have supported citizens and small businesses. It chose not to. We stand alone in affluent countries in lack of support and lack of Covid-19 mitigation.
But in the meantime, medical care professionals are worn out, tired, and pushed to their limit by for-profit hospitals. These are working members of our population that often don’t have representation (20.4% unionized).
If they strike, people die. If they break down, people die. So they just have to keep going.
It’s important to vote for legislation and people who will support these healthcare workers. It’s important to push hard for better actions towards vaccine distribution instead of the way we’ve failed disease control — for the sake of all of us, and medical professionals as well.
Information on the vaccine for Arizona:
AZCentral: What You Need To Know
