Monica Leigh Newton said she turned on her car’s headlights and drove 100 miles an hour to take her mother, Elaine McRae, to the emergency room in Gulfport, Mississippi, where the older woman worked as a nurse. medical on the Covid-19 floor.
McRae’s oxygen levels had dropped to a level that August night that could have caused brain damage. Newton’s mother never returned home after testing positive for Covid-19 at the hospital. Seventy-two days later, in November, he died at the same hospital where he had treated coronavirus patients.
“I literally watched her slowly deteriorate,” Newton said of her mother, whom she called her best friend and hero. “She was losing everything I ever saw in my mother. My mother is the most powerful human being in the world and this is exactly what she was slowly absorbed by this virus. “
What bothers Newton is that no one knows exactly how many health care workers, like her mother, died of coronavirus – thus quantifying in a way the sacrifices they made and the suffering they suffered from. to a disease they worked so hard to overcome.
As the death toll in the US Covid-19 continues to rise, the deaths of front-line health workers remain largely unestimated. Doctors, nurses, paramedics and nursing staff bravely took a huge risk during the pandemic, the most consuming health crisis in 100 years, but there is no specific number of deaths for them. These are the same people who received applause at the end of the exchanges and applause from the president and high-ranking members of the government and industry.
That particularly strikes Newton.
One of the last times she saw her mother, Newton shared the news that she had passed the certification test to become a nurse. She now works at a hospital in New Orleans, trying to follow in her mother’s footsteps and make sure her hero is remembered.
“We don’t even know what or who we lost,” Newton said. “My mother served through this pandemic. She helped these people, and if my family hadn’t said anything, they would have said it was a different number. “
Calculating the exact number of US health care workers who died of Covid-19 and its complications is not easy and becomes increasingly difficult as time goes on. There is no precise or central database with this information.
Dr. Claire Rezba, a Virginia anesthetist, has a national account posted on her Twitter account since March, when the pandemic began to sweep across the United States.
I don’t think health care systems have done a service by not publishing what’s going on inside their walls.
She maintains her number using obituaries, media reports, social networks, memoirs and any other means she can find. Rezba writes on Twitter about the deaths of nurses, doctors, emergency medical technicians, specialists and staff members every day.
Her number has reached almost 1,700, a figure she is sure is conservative.
“Every time I feel it’s time to stop – because it hurts, there’s an aspect of it that hurts – I’ll see another story or a few posts,” Rezba said. “And I think, ‘Well, that’s it. I just need to make sure people see her more. “
“There seems to be no one else to take the lead,” she added. “It simply came to our notice then. I mean, it’s ridiculous. Indeed, it is ridiculous. “
A September report by National Nurses United, a nurses’ union, estimated that it was slightly larger than Rezba, at just over 1,700 deaths among health workers since the beginning of the pandemic.
The latest number of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on December 22, is 955 deaths and more than 288,000 infections of medical staff. Of these cases of Covid-19 among health care workers, the CDC confirmed only 75.7% of the time whether or not the doctor, nurse, paramedic, or caregiver died.
A spokesman for health and human services said the figures were not comprehensive and said state health departments could have more accurate data.
Critics of the federal coronavirus response say the national number may be hampered by the White House mix. The administration announced its decision very abruptly in July for the Department of Health and Human Services to take over the collection of coronavirus data from the hospital at the CDC, making it difficult to track hospital trends and report data.
“There is widespread resistance from the healthcare industry to transparently provide information about nurses and other deaths of health care workers due to Covid-19,” National Nurses United said in its study. At the same time, federal, state and local governments have failed to force medical institutions to provide this data.
It is difficult to know which number is correct. Only 15 states provide the number of infections per week for health care workers, according to the health care union, and only in May did nursing homes be forced to provide information about the infection and mortality of its workers to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
While the public can now access this information from nursing homes, hospitals are not required to share their data.
“I don’t think health care systems have done a service by not publicizing what’s going on inside their walls,” Rezba said. “A lot of the deaths I find for health workers are really a bit secretive. They are swept under the carpet. “
Rezba pointed out that these deaths also include the loss of a huge amount of expertise and knowledge that these health workers have had.
Newton said it was true for her mother, a nurse with decades of experience who taught her nursing elements, saying she could never learn at school.
“My mother fought 100% for her patients’ teeth and nails,” she said. “And we lost that, society lost that – we lost someone who would have fought for everyone and for anyone who came in contact with it.”
The last time Newton could see her mother, she could not speak because of the tubes in her mouth, but McRae acknowledged the news that her daughter had passed the medical examination.
“She was receptive, but she lost it,” Newton said with a sigh. “He just wasn’t there anymore.”
The federal government does not require hospitals to provide data on infection rates and mortality of health care workers, and there is no central reporting structure for them to be housed, said Katherine Hancock, chief care officer at Cleveland Clinic. which oversees 70,000 healthcare. workers.
The Cleveland Clinic is following outbreaks in its medical units, she said. It reports these figures and supports its staff through hospitalizations and quarantines. So far, it has had only one death, but staff remain physically and emotionally overwhelmed by the pandemic.
“We follow him and talk about it all day: not only do we obviously look at our patients, but we also look at the number of caregivers who are gone because of Covid-19, those who are positive, those who are in hospital and those who returned to work, ”Hancock said. “So we have a very good maneuver to be honest with you and I don’t know why others have had such difficulties.”
Without anyone tracking these deaths, it is left to families, friends and communities who have lost loved ones who have been health workers to ensure that their sacrifices are not forgotten. All this comes in a greater relief for many, because the holidays have arrived and the desire to check in with the family.