Episode Details

Amy Taylor is a Georgia Native and is a NICU nurse and critical care nurse. When she first heard about the coronavirus she wasn’t inclined to worry about it. As a nurse she thought, “If you’re not bleeding out you’re fine… This will pass…” But within several days it escalated quickly and it became harmful to health care workers.

She described how at the beginning the hospital she worked at would not allow someone to bring more than one person into the hospital with them and each time someone came in to the hospital their temperature was taken. Then big tents were set up outside the hospital and people had to be screened outside. “It looked like something from a third world country where you think ‘this isn’t happening here.’”

Shortages of Personal Protective Equipment began within a few days of Trump acknowledging the severity of the virus. Amy takes about how airborne viruses are combatted by using a negative pressure room so that the virus does not spread through the air vents. She tells the story about a nurse in her hospital having to treat a patient with Tuberculosis with no mask because they’re were none available due to the PPE shortages. And Amy says the shortages had started before it got bad where she lives. “The nurses had no masks. It was health care workers stealing them, it was people hoarding them, management started hoarding them…”

Masks are supposed to be a one-time use but now nurses get one N95 mask and they are to wear it the whole day. There are not enough gowns, which are also not reusable, and nurses are now wearing them all day long. Gowns are, like all Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), are for the protection of both the patient and the health care provider. Health Care Providers could now carry the virus from patient to patient by not changing their PPE.

It’s really scary because not only are these nurses trying to manage their own anxiety as a person in this crisis—making sure they and their family have enough food and supplies—but nurses are also managing the fears and anxieties of their patients, and the fear passing the virus to them now extends bringing it home to their loved ones.

These are not the typical problems of 1st world countries. Amy said the CDC has changed the rules from requiring N95 masks on every nurse to allowing heath care providers to just use a bandana. She said, “That doesn’t actually do anything.”

The climate among the nurses are the hospital she works at is this overall sense of deprivation and fear. “And that fear looks different for everybody… it looks like snapping at other people… it looks like lack of empathy towards others… A crass-ness…” It’s very low morale. There are people who are very angry and people who are very tearful.

Danielle asked if we could sew masks and other protective gear for nurses. Amy said that studies show that homemade PPE is not effective so a better way to support medical staff is to donate N95 masks if you have them, and make your own masks to wear out. Nurses who have been exposed to the coronavirus are getting sicker than others so it appears that there is a cumulative affect to being exposed virus.

The idea that the virus lingers in the air for up to three hours is terrifying because if the virus is in a place that has an HVAC system, the virus would then be pumped to every room of that building through the air vents. It’s a scary thought to enter a building let alone a hospital.

Maggie asked how patients coming into the hospitals have been: Amy said that initially people are just wanting to know [if they have it]— ERs were flooded with people wanting to get tested because they were running a temperature and their hospital didn’t have the capacity to test people who were not critica