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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.

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