Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
If Too Many Health Care Workers Get Sick 'We Aren’t Going To Have A Shot At Fighting This Thing'
When Jenny Managhebi comes home to her husband and two children these days, she wonders about the people she treated at UC Davis Medical Center — the ones who coughed and the ones who sneezed. Ever since a patient with covid-19 was brought to the Sacramento hospital Feb. 19, Managhebi, who has been a cardiology nurse for 13 years, has grown concerned about catching the coronavirus, which causes the disease, and spreading it to other patients. She worries about whether she should still be volunteering in her 6-year-old’s classroom. She worries about whether she is adequately protected. (Mettler, Hernandez, Wan and Bernstein, 3/5)
In the fight against the coronavirus, nurses play a critical role, but some on the front lines in the hardest-hit areas in the United States say they fear that their health is not being made a priority. Nurses in Washington State and California said they have had to beg for N95 masks, which are thicker than surgical masks and block out much smaller particles, and have faced ridicule from colleagues when expressing concerns about catching the highly contagious virus. Some have complained about being pulled out of quarantine early to treat patients because of staff shortages. (Stockman and Baker, 3/5)
As more than 100 hospital workers remain in self-imposed quarantine in California, a proposed regulation designed to protect them from infectious diseases such as the coronavirus languishes inside a federal agency. The draft regulation would require employers to provide protective gear for health-care workers and to create infection-control plans, which could include building isolation rooms. The Obama administration was working to adopt the regulation, but the Trump administration in 2017 moved it to a less urgent, long-term agenda and work on it stopped. (Kindy, 3/5)
A quarantined nurse in a northern California facility said Thursday that they have not been tested for coronavirus due to issues with the federal government’s bureaucratic roadblocks. “As a nurse, I’m very concerned that not enough is being done to stop the spread of the coronavirus,” the nurse wrote in a statement shared by their union, the California Nurses Association. (Klar, 3/5)
As officials ramp up efforts to curtail the spread of the new coronavirus, San Francisco General Hospital’s nurses and doctors fear the overcrowded and understaffed medical center is not prepared to handle an imminent local outbreak. The public health emergency — including two confirmed cases in San Francisco — underscores the potential dire consequences of the hospital’s chronic lack of resources, city health workers said at a rally and Board of Supervisors committee hearing on Thursday. (Bauman, 3/5)
Kaiser Health News: On Front Lines, First Responders Brace For Coronavirus ― And Their Own Protection
When first responders answered roughly 10 calls from a long-term care center in Kirkland, Washington, over the course of a week, they did not expect to become patients themselves. Entering the Life Care Center of Kirkland last month exposed them to the novel coronavirus that sickens people with an illness known as COVID-19. Because the emergency calls came before authorities realized the virus was circulating in the community, some of the responders did not wear protective gear. (Heredia Rodriguez, 3/6)
