It seems inconceivable that in the United States, passing through the sinister milestone of half a million deaths COVID-19, a company prohibits its employees from wearing masks. However, this happened less than a year ago in one of the largest supermarket chains in Florida, when the coronavirus spread around the world and terror began to strike.
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In that time Gerardo Gutierrez, 70, worked at a Publix supermarket in Miami Beach.
He died at the end of April after contracting the coronavirus in March, that horrible month in which explained the pandemic, in which Italy entered a national confinement causing sedation in the West and in which the deceased in U.S they were still in the hundreds.
“We were all panicked already”recalls his daughter Ariane, the plaintiff in a civil case against Publix for wrongful death. There, he claims that a colleague who worked very close to Gutiérrez had a cough and other symptoms of the virus, but Publix He then forbade his employees to wear masks, because “they didn’t want to scare customers”.
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“The result was that my father died”the daughter says at her home in Miami Beach. ‘I had gone to work every day without a mask or gloves, and
they allowed him to use them. ”
On March 23 Miami Beach it was the first Florida city to order a landfill and shut the beaches. But Publix waited until the first week of April to allow its employees to voluntarily wear masks, the lawsuit said.
The policy change came late for Gutiérrez, who was already very ill. He was hospitalized on April 10 and was discharged from Zoom by his friends and family on April 28. He died that day.
“He loved to swim. He was very active, very vital. He could have lived for many more years.” Ariane says, showing photos of the Cuban father. Two weeks ago, a judge rejected a request from the supermarket chain to treat the complaint as workers’ compensation and not a lawsuit. The company did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
“We keep paying”
In early March, Miami Beach was still in the middle of its most touristy season. It’s the time when students from all over the country take spring break and celebrate their childhood on the beaches of Florida as if tomorrow doesn’t exist.
Much was said at the time about the inconvenient party atmosphere on this island off the coast of Miami, when much of the country first applied rules of social distance – a term previously unknown.
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“People are slow to pay attention,” remembers Ariane Gutiérrez. ‘And we still haven’t got over it“That month, businesses closed, shelves were cleared, and the shortage of masks became dangerous. Therefore, health authorities initially did not recommend their use to the general public to ensure that medical personnel had adequate supplies.”
“That message at the start of the pandemic was a major strategic public health mistake”says Purnima Madhivanan, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona.
In addition, in a puzzling way to health professionals and scientists, the face mask it became a political statement because Donald Trump, who was president, refused to wear it for months. Sometimes he even teased those who did. “Those mixed messages confuse people,” says the epidemiologist.
And we keep paying for it. Masks are essential. ‘
Ariane Gutiérrez looks at a photo of her father Gerardo Gutiérrez.
Living with Covid
One of the lessons from these episodes, according to the expert, is that, “As much as we’d like to say that science triumphs, science is only as good as the messengers who communicate it.”
A January study of the University of Southern California found that a large majority (80-90%) of Americans believe that use masks It’s an effective way to protect against Covid-19, but only half of them use it consistently.
This shows that “knowledge does not necessarily change into behavior”Madhivanan complains. Initially, it was thought that warm weather killed the virus, that shopping bags needed to be sanitized, that race was a factor – it turns out that inequality was the factor – and many, like Gutiérrez, suffered the damage from misinformation.
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Some things have changed (who continues to disinfect tomato cans?), But others, such as the use of masks, should become as “normalized” in the West as it is in Asian countries, the epidemiologist warns. “We will have to live with the covid,” he says.
“There will never be a time when we can say the covid will be gone. We just have to learn to deal with it, like the flu.”
AFP
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