Doctors and nurses across the United States are beginning to feel exhausted and demoralized as they face a record wave of COVID-19 patients that is overwhelming hospitals and prompting governors to once again clamp down on the coronavirus.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo on Friday banned eating inside restaurants in New York City, saying he had been waiting in vain for hospitalization rates to stabilize.
For his part, Gov. Tom Wolf did the same in Pennsylvania on Thursday, also suspending sports in schools and closing gyms, movie theaters and casinos.
A record more than 107,000 people with COVID-19 were hospitalized in the United States on Thursday, according to the COVID Tracking Project. More than 290,000 Americans have died from the virus.
Hospitals across the country have been overwhelmed.
“We’re constantly looking for beds,” said Cassie Ban, an intensive care nurse at Indiana University Health.
Before the pandemic, a nurse in the intensive care unit could care for two patients per shift. Ban said he currently serves four or five. The national death rate does not reflect what COVID-19 does to each seriously ill patient or the medical teams who care for them, he added.
“I wish people could see what I see,” Ban said. “People are terrified and they are alone. Each of those numbers is the death of a person who was not yet ready to leave.
While concerns persist about getting enough beds, masks and other equipment, many frontline workers are more concerned about staffing shortages.
Nurses are the scarcest resource of all, said Kiersten Henry, an ICU nurse at MedStar Montgomery Medical Center in Olney, Maryland.
“I feel like we’ve already run a marathon, and this is our second. Even people who are optimistic are feeling drained right now, ”Henry said.
Many expressed frustration at the indifference of some Americans, and even contempt, towards basic precautions against the virus.
Dr Lew Kaplan, an intensive care surgeon at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, said health workers are treated as “heroes” for helping patients, but regarded as “almost the devil himself” when they ask people to wear masks.
“It is very discouraging, while one struggles to handle the arrival of patients, there are others who do not accept public health measures,” said Kaplan, president of the Society for Intensive Care Medicine.
Raju Mehrta, an intensivist physician at the Advocate Health and Hospital in the Chicago area, said that early in the pandemic many frontline workers had a sense of purpose that filled them with energy. Now that morale starts to crumble
“Seeing what we are seeing, day after day, for eight months, takes its toll,” Mehta said. “It is difficult to know what we see, and then to see what happens outside our walls.”
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