Amid Growing Health Threats, Nurses Are Still Fighting for Basic Protections
Five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic caught our health care system unawares, nurses and other health care workers say we are no more prepared for the next threat.
“It’s scary,” says Tatiana Mukhtar, a nurse in New Orleans. The exposure during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic “was horrific, for patients and for health care workers” she says, “and having been there and having experienced that, I feel like we have learned nothing because [health care systems] are still not doing what we need to do.”
Although the emergency feeling of spring 2020 may have faded, the need for public health measures to combat the spread of disease remains urgent. COVID is still circulating widely, and studies show that at least 35 million adults have experienced Long COVID, and that COVID increases the risk of heart disease in both children and adults. This has also been the most dangerous flu season in 15 years, with up to 92,000 people dying of the flu between October 1, 2024 and mid-February this year.
The U.S. also faces a resurgence of both tuberculosis (TB) and measles, the latter of which is one of the most contagious viruses on Earth. Meanwhile, with the threat of a bird flu outbreak among humans also looming on the horizon, the Trump administration is eliminating what Mary Bowman, a nursing assistant professor, refers to as our “already meager public health infrastructure.”
“In truth, what was laid bare by the beginning of COVID was how disinterested capitalism is in people caring for themselves when they’re sick, when they could be sick, when they could get other people sick, when their families are sick, when someone dies,” Bowman told Truthout. “There’s just no space for humanity in it.”
Early in the pandemic, nurses fought against dangerous work conditions, and were in many cases successful. Celia Nieto, an ICU nurse in Nevada and member of the National Nurses United (NNU) union, says hospital administrators “tried to force us to recycle our masks to chemically disinfect them and we absolutely refused to.”
“We had to fight for everything, you know, every bit of PPE [personal protective equipment] and precautions,” echoes Nick Shillingford, a nurse and former union steward who is unaffiliated with NNU. “Their starting point was not giving us the protections we needed.” The anomaly, says Shillingford, was the temporary mask mandate that hospitals implemented once public opinion forced them to do so.
Now many of those gains have disappeared. Mukhtar, a member of NNU, told Truthout that despite nurses’ successful fights for access to adequate PPE in 2020, there are no N95 masks available in her unit now. Finding an N95 in the hospital “is like pulling teeth,” she says. Mukhtar’s experiences are echoed by NNU’s national survey from Fall 2024, which shows that almost 20 percent of nurses surveyed are still forced to reuse N95s designed for single use, even now that there is no legitimate excuse for hospitals not to stockpile adequate PPE.
https://truthout.org/articles/amid-growing-health-threats-nurses-are-still-fighting-for-basic-protections/
Even though I'm no longer an active nurse, these are my people, and this makes me mad as hell!