As pandemic enters its second year, exhausted health care workers are wary of what comes next Chanelle Chandler
Following a record nationwide surge in early January for hospitalizations from COVID-19, which has so far infected over 26 million Americans and killed more that 444,000, health care workers at U.S. hospitals are speaking out about the toll of serving on the front lines of the pandemic.
Monique Bennett, a registered respiratory therapist from Houston, Texas, has been stationed at three different hospitals since the pandemic began and is now helping overburdened medical workers at Orange County Medical Center in Santa Ana, Calif.
Nurses applaud as state marks the end of waivers extending safe staffing ratios
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and last updated 2021-02-02 00:52:00-05
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KERO) â After months of working to meet the new allowances of patient-nurse ratios approved by the state, California nurses will soon take a sigh of relief.
The California Department of Public Health announced that as of Monday, the department will no longer accept any new expedited staffing waivers. Furthermore, all existing approved staffing waivers will expire on February 8, unless CDPH determines on an individual waiver basis that there is an unprecedented circumstance.
Hospitals must maintain efforts to meet required staffing levels at all times.
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A 28-year-old woman and a 29-year-old man, both from central San Diego and with other underlying health conditions, are among the 44 COVID-related deaths announced by the county health department Wednesday.
The pair in their 20s illustrate the true cost of so many infections piling up in late December and early January which, according to the county’s official tally, is now the deadliest month of the pandemic. A total of 751 lives have been lost since the first day of 2021, 83 more than in December and nearly four times as many as were recorded during the summer surge in July.
Hospitals and funerals continue to struggle to keep up with the sheer number of newly-deceased, reaching out to the county medical examiner’s office for “mobile facilities” refrigerated semi tractor trailers to handle the overflow.
SACRAMENTO As intensive care units filled and coronavirus cases surged over the holidays, Carmela Coyle invoked a World War II-era quote attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to rally her own troops: If you re going through hell, keep going.
Coyle is head of the California Hospital Association, and her troops are the highly paid hospital executives she represents. Throughout the pandemic, as in the December memo in which she quoted Churchill, she has employed battlefield rhetoric to galvanize their massive political and financial clout.
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That s because Coyle believes hospitals are quite simply in battle conditions a sentiment she has impressed upon the state s top health care officials.
On the frontline of the pandemic, ICU nurses have been up close and personal with every curveball the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown at them. With new waivers threatening to increase the nurse-to-patient ratio, one Bakersfield nurse says the toll is becoming too much.