Opinion | Health care workers like me need more protection to fight coronavirus

I’ve been a nurse for 16 years and going into work every day has never been more challenging. Doctors, physician assistants, nurses and other health care workers are serving on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis, and the situation we are facing can be summed up with one word: chaos. This chaotic situation is the direct result of three things: inadequate supplies of personal protection equipment, lack of policies that protect health care workers, and skyrocketing caseloads.  

We desperately need critical supplies: masks, PPEs, ventilators and testing kits.  The lack of protective gear leaves me, my colleagues and medical professionals across the state and nation at risk of becoming infected.

Sadly, more and more nurses and other health care workers across the state have become infected after treating COVID-19 patients. Some have even died. That’s why we are also advocating for new policies, like paid time off, that will ensure nurses don’t lose their income because they have to quarantine after being exposed on the job.

We also need policies that ensure nurses with pre-existing conditions who are vulnerable to contracting the virus aren’t required to treat COVID-19 patients. Intentional actions like increasing efforts to retrain and put laid-off nurses back to work will make this possible and help improve patient to nurse ratios.

For health care workers like me, this situation is heartbreaking. Witnessing the suffering firsthand and knowing that the spread of the virus could have been limited is extremely frustrating. Public health experts warned national leaders in January to prepare for this predictable crisis, but instead of being proactive, they delayed. We were able to watch the impact COVID-19 had in China and Italy, so ignoring the experts is just inexcusable.

No one is to blame for the coronavirus outbreak, but the breadth of the chaos COVID-19 has caused is the direct result of a failure – at many levels – to proactively prepare. While I wish the president had done more to prepare, what matters most is getting equipment and policy protections in place for nurses and other health care professionals as soon as possible.

COVID-19 has already claimed the lives of too many Michiganders and even more have contracted the virus. It’s time to put partisan politics aside and begin working toward positive outcomes to protect our health care workers battling this virus on the front lines.