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Dealing with supply shortages and the worry that this could simply be the start, a nurse working in a New york city City emergency clinic, with 12 years’ experience, informs the BBC what it’s like on the cutting edge of America’s coronavirus break out.
What have you been seeing in ER in the last couple of weeks?
We’ve seen an influx of clients that are can be found in with the common Covid symptom – fever, cough, often sore throat, lung discomfort, chest pain. Other individuals are being available in with gastro-intestinal signs which are queasiness, vomiting, diarrhoea, which have been determined as possibly an early sign of Covid.
We’re likewise noticing that our patients are being available in with red eyes, their eyes are red around the rim. You can look at these clients that are coming in that turn out to be Covid positive and you can see the sickness in their face, in their eyes.
Our emergency clinic is totally Covid. And we’re short staffed, so it puts an even larger strain on our emergency-care system.
Do you have enough devices?
The short response to that no, we don’t. Since the last day that I worked, we were running out of pumps. When a patient has an IV hooked-up, there is a device that’s sitting next to you that computes the medication, making sure it is being given to you at the right time and the right amount. We are running out of those pumps.
We’re offering clients medications to sedate them and we do not even have the right equipment to monitor them.
We are being allocated PPE – which is our individual protective equipment. We’re getting one N-95 mask and we’re having to reuse it for five shifts. Before this pandemic, you were never ever to reuse this equipment. It was one time use and it was tossed out. It was discarded. Now we are being informed to utilize it for our shift, put it in a paper bag and save it for next shift. After 5 shifts, we turn it in and we’ll get a new one.
We’re lacking fundamental products since all of our clients are requiring a lot.
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