Los Angeles emergency room nurse Sandra Younan spent the last year juggling for hours as she watched as many patients battled the coronavirus and some died.
Then there were the patients who claimed that the virus was fake or that she had coughed in her face, ignoring the rules of the mask. A man was released from hospital after a positive COVID-19 test, refusing to believe it was correct.
“You have patients who literally die and then you have patients who deny the disease,” she said. “You try to educate and you try to educate, but then you hit a wall.”
False claims about viruses, masks and vaccines have exploded since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic a year ago. Journalists, public health officials and technology companies have tried to push back against falsehoods, but much of the task of correcting misinformation has gone to world-class healthcare workers.
In Germany, a video showing a nurse using an empty syringe while practicing vaccinations traveled widely online, as alleged evidence that COVID-19 is false. Doctors in Afghanistan reported patients who told them that COVID-19 was created by the US and China to reduce the world’s population. In Bolivia, medical workers had to take care of five people who ingested a counterfeit counterfeit toxic bleaching agent as a COVID-19 remedy.
Younan, 27, says her friends used to describe her as “the coldest person of all time,” but now she’s dealing with crushing anxiety.
“My life is to be a nurse, so I don’t care if you’re really sick, you throw me with me, whatever,” Younan said. “But when you know what you’re doing, it’s wrong and I repeatedly ask you to wear a mask to protect me and you still don’t do it, as if you have no respect for anyone but yourself. And that’s why this virus is spreading. It just makes you lose hope. ”
Emily Scott, 36, who is based in a Seattle hospital, has worked all over the world on medical missions and last year helped the first US patient COVID-19. She was selected due to her work experience in Sierra Leone during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.
While many Americans were terrified of Ebola – a disease that is not as contagious as coronavirus and poses a small threat in the United States – they are not afraid enough of COVID-19, she said.
Scott blames several factors: the frightening symptoms of Ebola, racism against Africans and the politicization of COVID-19 by elected officials.
“I felt much safer in Sierra Leone during Ebola than at the beginning of this outbreak in the United States,” Scott said, because of the number of people who ignored social distancing and masked the directives. “Things that are facts and science have become politicized.”
Emergency nurse L’Erin Ogle heard a litany of false claims about the virus while working at a hospital in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas. These include: The virus is no worse than the flu. It is caused by 5G wireless towers. Masks will not help and can hurt. Or, the most painful for her: the virus is not real, and doctors and nurses are engaged in a vast global conspiracy to hide the truth.
“It feels so victorious and makes you wonder, ‘Why am I doing this?’ said Ogle, 40.
Nurses are often the providers of medical services with the most contact with patients, and patients frequently consider nurses to be more affordable, according to Professor Maria Brann, an expert in health communication at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. This means that nurses are more likely to greet patients by spreading misinformation, which gives them a special opportunity to intervene.
Nurses have always advocated for patients, but this pandemic has thrown them much further, Brann said. “It simply came to our notice then. It’s not necessarily what they signed up for. ”
In some cases, nurses and other health workers spread misinformation. And many nurses say they encounter fakes about the coronavirus vaccine in their own families.
For 31-year-old Brenda Olmos, a nurse in Austin, Texas, who focuses on a population of geriatric and Hispanic patients, it was crazy to get the vaccine. But first she had to debate her parents, who had heard unfounded claims that the shooting would cause infertility. and Bell’s palsy on TV shows in Spanish.
Olmos eventually convinced her parents to get the vaccine as well, but she worries about the vaccine’s hesitation in her community.
When he recently met an elderly patient with cancerous tumors, Olmos knew that the growth had taken years to develop. But the adult children of the man who recently received the vaccine insisted that the two are connected.
“It seemed too accidental to them,” Olmos said. “I just wanted him not to have that guilt.”
Olmos said the real problem with misinformation is not just bad actors spreading lies, but people believe false accusations because they are not as comfortable navigating complex medical discoveries.
“The low level of literacy is the real pandemic,” she said. “As health care providers, we have a duty to provide information in a pleasant and easy to understand way so that people do not consume misinformation because they cannot digest real data.”
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted his state’s mask this month, against the guidance of many scientists, nurse Guillermo Carnegie called the decision “spit in the face.”
“I was disgusted,” said Carnegie, 34, of Temple, Texas. “This governor and different people are behaving like, ‘Oh, we’re proud of our front-line workers, we support them.’ But then they do something like that and tax the medical field enormously ”.
Brian Southwell, who started a program at Duke University School of Medicine to prepare medical professionals how to talk to misinformed patients, said providers should see the patient they are entrusted with as an opportunity.
“That patient has enough confidence in you to gather this information from you,” Southwell said. “And that’s a good thing, even if you don’t agree with it.”
He said medical workers should oppose entering the “academic way of arguing” and instead find out why patients have certain beliefs – and whether they might be open to other ideas.
This act of listening is imperative for building trust, according to Dr. Seema Yasmin, a physician, journalist and professor at Stanford University who studies medical misinformation.
“Put the pen down, leave the notebook and listen,” Yasmin said.
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Associated Press writer John Leicester of Le Pecq, France, contributed to the report.
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More AP coverage of the first year of the pandemic: Pandemic: one year