“Why are all the nurses in other countries in bunny suits and hazmat gear — practically like Ebola protocols — and we’re not?”
— a surge of COVID-19 patients, health care workers are seeing unprecedented shortages of personal protective equipment . They are begging the government, private companies, and hospital management for help. “My day starts out every morning with nurses describing to me how they are being refused the N95s and having to take care of [COVID-19] positive patients,” says Bonnie Castillo, a registered nurse and executive director of National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union.
The concern goes well beyond the obvious and urgent moral obligation to protect the health of doctors and nurses, along with their families and friends. If significant numbers of healthcare workers get sick, as has happened in Italy and elsewhere, it could have catastrophic consequences, affecting hospitals’ ability to care for what is anticipated to be an already overwhelming flood of COVID-19 sufferers, not to mention patients who need help for other problems, from cancer to accidents.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lowered its guidelines for health care workers, suggesting it’s acceptable to use surgical masks instead of N95s. “There’s a lot of distrust for the CDC right now on the part of registered nurses,” says Katy Roemer, a registered nurse and vice president for National Nurses United. “CDC downgraded the criteria because of a shortage of equipment, not based on the science of how this virus is transmitted or the precautionary principle.
There are many factors behind the shortage, though nurses point specifically to for-profit hospitals’ use of a “just-in-time” organizational system that’s not built for times of crisis, along with a lack of planning on the part of both some hospital administrators and federal and state governments. There are also significant supply-chain shortages after the pandemic ran through China, the main source of PPE manufacturing.
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