Nurse Leslie McKamey has gotten used to the 16-hour shifts, to skipping lunch, to the nightly ritual of throwing all her clothes in the laundry and showering as soon as she walks through the door to avoid potentially infecting her children. She’s even grown accustomed to triaging Covid patients, who often arrive at the emergency room so short of breath they struggle to describe their symptoms.
But despite the trauma and exhaustion of the last eight months, she was shocked when North Dakota’s governor, Doug Burgum, said last week that healthcare workers who test positive for coronavirus but do not display symptoms could still report to work. The order, which is in line with CDC guidance for mitigating staff shortages, would only allow asymptomatic health workers who test positive to work in Covid units, and treat patients who already have the virus.
But many feel the idea endangers the workers themselves and their colleagues. It comes as North Dakota faces one of the worst outbreaks of Covid-19 and grapples with healthcare staff shortages.
“We’re worried about somebody dying, frankly, because we couldn’t get to them in time,” said McKamey, an emergency room nurse in Bismarck.
According to data from the Covid Tracking Project, more than 9,400 North Dakotans tested positive for Covid-19 last week alone. About one in 12 North Dakota residents have been infected with the virus; nearly one in 1,000 have died. In early November , the North Dakota department of health reported that there were only 12 open ICU beds in the entire state.
McKamey said Burgum’s order goes against everything she’s been taught as a nurse.
“If hospital administrators start forcing Covid-positive staff to go to work, it’s going to be very scary. We’re trained to do no harm, and asking Covid-positive, asymptomatic nurses to return to work is putting patients at risk. It’s putting fellow staff members at risk.”
Nine months into the pandemic, it’s clear healthcare workers already face increased risks. Lost on the Frontline, a joint effort by the Guardian and Kaiser Health News, is investigating the deaths of 1,375 healthcare workers who appear to have died of Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic. Nearly a third of those healthcare workers were nurses.
Making jobs people can live on and providing enough of them for everyone should be the goal
this is the problem with statistic victorys, they declare they win because look at all the jobs, but in the process they cut everything that we needed from the jobs, but they dont care, they got a good looking statistic
There’s a saying from computer science.
“Whatever you measure will improve. This is a warning”
Whether it’s metrics you’re applying to employees, or unit tests of AIs, or fulfilling statistical victories.
Want more lines of code written? Done, now no one writes short, snappy code and every if statement uses three different lines.
Want this neural net that’s learning how to walk to reach the furthest distance? Now it makes itself impossibly tall so that when it falls down, the top of it reaches further.
Want more jobs? Well, the finger on that monkey paw is curling up as you speak.
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the oldest Republican and President Pro Tempore of the Senate, has tested positive for Covid-19.The Senator was at the Capitol on Monday and spoke on the Senate floor, taking off his mask to do so.
Trump tweets a victory that gets reversed on air. Wayne County just reversed its decision and votes 4-0 to certify. As seen live on CNN with Michigan’s Secretary of State, Trump tweets. CNN went to commercial break, and the ruling is reversed. BAM!
