Nurses Share Stories From The Coronavirus Surge

Nine months. 13 million cases. More than 260,000 deaths. How are health care workers doing? We talk with nurses about what they’ve seen, and how they’ve endured.  

Guests

Juan Anchondo, medical-surgical floor nurse at the Las Palmas Medical Center in El Paso, Texas. During the pandemic, he’s taken care of COVID-19 patients and has been floated to the COVID floor every two weeks.

Mary Jo Kelly, critical care clinical nurse specialist at the University of Washington Medical Center — Northwest Campus. (@UWMedicine)

Ellen Arigorat, clinical nurse informaticist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. She was redeployed to go back to bedside in April and May.

Also Featured

Adam Hohman, a North Dakota-based nurse practitioner who works in rural Minnesota.

Nina Geiss, nursing assistant in Orange County, New York.

From The Reading List

New York Times: “Nurses Are at High Risk for Covid Among Health Workers, C.D.C. Says” — “Among health care workers, nurses in particular have been at significant risk of contracting Covid-19, according to a new analysis of hospitalized patients by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

Washington Post: “Some places were short on nurses before the virus. The pandemic is making it much worse.” — “In Bismarck, N.D., where Leslie McKamey is a nurse in the emergency department at CHI St. Alexius Health, caregivers have been so overwhelmed by covid-19 patients in the past few weeks that ambulances are sometimes diverted to the other major hospital in town.”

Associated Press: “Hospitals competing for nurses as US coronavirus cases surge” — “As the coronavirus pandemic surges across the nation and infections and hospitalizations rise, medical administrators are scrambling to find enough nursing help — especially in rural areas and at small hospitals.”

CNN: “Covid-19 is taking a devastating toll on Filipino American nurses” — “Nearly a third of the nurses who’ve died of coronavirus in the US are Filipino, even though Filipino nurses make up just 4% of the nursing population nationwide.”

Hartford Courant: “With COVID-19 surging in Connecticut, health care workers at local hospitals feel the anxiety rising” — “As COVID-19 surges in Connecticut once again, Sherri Dayton, a registered nurse at the Plainfield Emergency Care Center, is dreading the coming winter.”

This article was originally published on WBUR.org. [Copyright 2020 NPR]