A woman was found dead at home for atleast 12 hours, with only her 4-year-old daughter by her side. Her early reports revealed that she was 42, a mammogram technician at a hospital and most certainly a COVID-19 patient. Anesthesiologist Claire Rezba, was going through this news on her phone and was terribly dismayed. Rezba felt her sacrifice was great and so was her child’s sacrifice. For days together Rezba kept clicking through Google in search of a name. In late March, the new stories mentioned one: Diedre Wilkes. Unknowingly Rezba began to keep a count.
The next on her list was James Goodrich, a pediatric neurosurgeon in New York City, a pioneer in separating twins conjoined at the head. Goodrich’s death was deeply personal to Rezba. The coronavirus was affecting the healthcare professionals in the worst manner.
Initially looking out for their obituaries was a way to rein her own fear. Since elective surgeries had been canceled at her hospital in Richmond, Virginia, she had long hours to fret. Her husband was a physician, an orthopedic surgeon at a different hospital and her sister was a nurse practitioner. Being a witness to the lives and deaths of people she didn’t know distracted her from the risk faced by her loved ones. For her it was a way of coping with her feelings.
Rezba usually digs through information in the middle of the night, when she cannot sleep. She Googles for local news stories and if she still doesn’t feel tired, she turns to the obituary site Legacy.com. Her hunt for someone’s occupation as well as the cause for death takes her to Facebook.
On April 14, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared in its publication the first count of healthcare workers lost to COVID-19: 27 deaths.
But Rezba’s list included a higher number- with drug treatment counselors, ER staff, nurses, medical assistants, physical therapists, orderlies and EMTs. This deeply upset Rezba. She said if she was just one person using Google who already counted more than 200 people, how could they say just 27- a big discrepancy.
Soon she started spending a couple of hours surfing the internet for the recently dead. It saddened and then enraged her to witness how tough they were to find. How quickly people who gave their lives in service to others had been forgotten. She realized that invisibility was not an accident and felt that many hospitals and nursing homes were trying to hide what was happening.
Public health and government officials were silent instead of acting like watchdogs. Now she could force the government and the public to see them so that they understand the contribution.
Through the end of July, nearly 120,000 doctors, nurses and other medical personnel were infected by the virus in the U.S. while the CDC mentioned that atleast 587 were dead.
Kent Sepkowitz, an infectious disease specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City mentions that this is certainly a gross underestimate.
On the basis of state data and past epidemics, Sepkowitz mentions that he would expect healthcare workers would add up to 5% to 15% of all coronavirus infections in the U.S. So, the number of workers who were infected by the virus would be 200,000 or may be much higher.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services mentions 767 deaths of nursing home staff, a Washington Post op-ed declared. National Nurses United, mentioned 1,289 deaths among all categories of healthcare professionals, which includes 169 nurses.
Christopher Friese, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing says that the loss of so many dedicated, deeply experienced healthcare professionals amidst the crisis is unfathomable. The loss of every worker is one less person meant to take care of our loved ones. The workforce is getting depleted unnecessarily when tools were at our disposal to prevent death and sickness.
He said that a powerful tool to battle COVID-19 in the medical workforce is missing: reliable data about infections and death.
Friese says that we don’t know where healthcare workers are at high risk.
Patricia Davidson, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing said that learning from the sick and dead should be a national priority, to improve care in the pandemic and beyond, also to protect the workforce.