| from: | The Week <newsletter@theweek.com> |
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| to: | bjarias@gmail.com |
| date: | Apr 4, 2020, 12:05 PM |
| subject: | Preview of this week's issue: Life on the pandemic's front lines |
Dear newsletter reader,
We thought you'd appreciate this special preview from the latest issue
of The Week magazine, where you’ll find everything you need to know
about the unprecedented coronavirus crisis. Today's preview comes from
the Controversy of the Week section:
Health-care workers: Life on the pandemic's front lines
The situation in New York City hospitals is "‘post-apocalyptic — like in
one of those movies I used to watch,’" emergency nurse Judy
Sheridan-Gonzalez told Ariana Eunjung Cha in The Washington Post.
As the city’s Covid-19 death toll passed 1,000 this week, and with the
"apex" of infections and deaths still weeks away, New York health-care
workers are already close to their physical and emotional breaking
point.
With personal protective equipment (PPE) in short supply, doctors
and nurses are reusing disposable masks and wearing goggles and helmets
and even plastic bags brought from home as they navigate hallways and
waiting rooms filled with coughing, gasping, dying patients. These
heroes are working 12-hour shifts to save lives even as they know that
they could be next, said Bari Weiss in The New York Times.
The now-common task of intubating Covid-19 patients with pneumonia
requires medical workers to insert a plastic tube down a patient’s
throat, often resulting in coughing that sprays the worker with droplets
teeming with the virus. Hundreds of U.S. doctors and nurses have
already become sick. Hospital staffers in their 20s and 30s are "drawing
up their wills," choosing surrogate parents for their orphaned
children, and scrubbing themselves raw in the shower, conscious that
even "a trace of the coronavirus under a fingernail or on a strand of
hair" could cost them — and family members — their lives.
And the real horror still lies ahead, said
Jennifer Senior, also in the
Times.
Without enough ventilators and intensive-care beds, doctors may have to
make unilateral decisions about who gets treatment and who is left to
die. For people who’ve dedicated their lives to saving others, making
these decisions may inflict "moral injury" like that suffered by
soldiers in war zones. The result: nightmares, guilt, and lasting
trauma.
Yet doctors and nurses keep showing up to work, said
Leslie Marshall in
FoxNews.com. In New York, in fact, some 76,000
retired health-care
workers have volunteered to work on the front lines, as has my own
husband, an orthopedic surgeon.
Why? They "took an oath" to care for the
sick, and deeply feel "a responsibility to help stop the spread of this
virus." This is doctors’ "version of running into a burning building,"
said
Ruth Marcus in
The Washington Post.
Our country isn’t even providing them with sufficient protective
equipment, yet still they care for the sick, simply because it is "what
they do." When this is over "we must be forever grateful, and we should
not fail them again."
Don’t assume doctors and nurses will keep showing up, said
Dr. Thomas Kirsch in
TheAtlantic.com.
As the number of cases soars, and more and more of us get sick,
"I am
afraid a tipping point could happen with little warning."
Facing an
impossible caseload and insufficient beds, a dire shortage of PPE, and
the high likelihood of infection, some doctors and nurses and poorly
paid support staff may stop coming to work. We have families. We are
scared. "Our duty is not boundless."
To avoid a worst-case scenario, the
government must do "dramatically more" to support those of us on the
front lines — with more PPE, yes, but also with free places to stay so
we don’t infect our families, and a guarantee of "preferential access to
care and medications" if we ourselves get sick.
If society does not
take care of the caretakers, at some point soon
... "the system could break,
and we will all be gone."
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