Monday, December 21, 2020 by: Divina Ramirez
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https://www.hangthecensors.com/481814.html (Natural News) Nurses at the privately-owned Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital in New York went on strike on Tuesday, Dec. 8, demanding more staff and better equipment, as rising COVID-19 cases nationwide threatened to overwhelm hospitals.
Some 200 nurses represented by the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) walked out of their shifts at 7 a.m. for a planned two-day strike. They were asking the hospital for safer working conditions and to increase staffing levels in anticipation of the surge in COVID-19 patients.
Nurses said the hospital has been pushing them to care for too many patients than they could handle at a time. This forces nurses to choose which patient to rescue, said Judy Sheridan-Gonzalez, the president of the nurses’ union at the hospital. “That is just a horrible thing for health professionals to confront.”
Nurses were overworked before, but since March, many nurses have left the industry entirely, retiring early or seeking other work. While personal protective equipment supplies are more abundant now than in the spring, nurses are more burnt out than ever just as hospitals are getting ready for another wave of Covid-19 patients.
The executives who typically make the decisions at the United States’s hospitals, whether for-profit or ostensibly nonprofit, are uniquely unprepared for the coming deluge, experts say. A decadeslong failure to recruit and retain health care workers like nurses, technicians, and nurse’s aides has made U.S. hospitals less able to manage the scope of a pandemic, and makes it much more likely that hospitals will break down, as they did in the spring in Wuhan, Italy, and New York City.
Nurses Are Anxious and Angry in 2nd Wave: âWeâre Not Preparedâ
âWeâre worse off in some ways than we were in the beginning,â said one nurse about the lack of workers and resources at her New York hospital.
Among health care workers, nurses face a particularly high risk of contracting the virus, according to a recent report by the C.D.C.Credit.Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Dec. 17, 2020
In Albany, an outbreak of the coronavirus erupted among nurses and patients in the cancer unit of a hospital.
Across the state, nurses at hospitals in the Buffalo area bought their own masks and face shields
We’ve warned from early on in the Covid crisis that the driver of decisions to lock down or not would be driven by the level of distress in hospitals. While that call has been shown to be correct, officials have tended to be behind the curve on how quickly infections could accelerate and how that would in short order translate into near or actual crisis conditions in hospitals.
So here we are, in December, with the Thanksgiving infection spike proving to be generally worse than anticipated (our IM Doc reports that in his rural area, the uptick hit early and has oddly abated but his hospital is severely overloaded) and worse sure to be on the way after the Christmas-New Year holidays.