Gov. Newsom is letting hospitals make COVID-infected nurses work. That will kill people
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision to let California hospitals push infected health care employees back to work immediately, without isolation or testing, is akin to pouring water into a sinking ship. We want to help our patients get better — not infect them with a deadly virus.
Sending nurses and other health care staff back to work while infected is dangerous. If we get sick, who will be left to care for our patients?
Thousands of nurses and other employees are already sickened across the state. And news reports indicate that increasing numbers of injured or severely ill patients are contracting the virus in hospitals.
Yet Newsom and the California Department of Public Health’s solution is to turn our hospitals into even more precarious, super-spreading hot zones, infecting more patients and more staff. That will only prolong this pandemic and cause more tragedies for California families.
California’s pandemic policies were a model for the nation two years ago. Now we’re leading a race to the bottom.
The state’s new guidelines are even more hazardous to the health and safety of nurses, other health care workers and patients than the recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention rollback recommending only five days of isolation for those infected with the virus. Regrettably, this reckless guidance is driven not by public safety but by a hospital industry focused on maintaining business operations, revenues and profits without regard for science or the health of employees and the public.
For two years, nurses have pushed employers and held protests to demand the highest level of infectious disease control protocols. Those should include proper isolation of infected patients, expanded testing, optimal personal protective equipment for employees and assurance that any infected staff can isolate for the full time needed to heal and reduce the spread of the virus in our facilities.
Instead, we’ve seen hospitals refuse to implement proper safeguards and impose unsafe working conditions. Nurses who have decades of service providing therapeutic care for desperately ill patients report that they’ve never seen so many deaths, so many of their colleagues afraid to bring the deadly virus home to their families or so many nurses themselves becoming patients on ventilators in their own facilities.
We’ve also seen public officials and agencies fail to hold employers accountable for malfeasance and delay or weaken the measures needed to finally bring this terrible pandemic to an end.
The consequences for nurses and other health care workers have been catastrophic. At least 5,000 health care workers, including 500 registered nurses, have died of COVID. The country has suffered nearly 840,000 deaths, including more than 76,000 in California.
The staffing shortages fueling the latest industry panic were predictable. Increasing numbers of nurses are simply unwilling to stay at the bedside in perilous conditions, and they are walking away.
Instead of accommodating hospital executives, Newsom would have been wise to heed the words of Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan in a hearing Friday on the Republican challenge to President Joe Biden’s hospital vaccine mandate.
“The one thing we don’t want you to do is to kill your patients,” Kagan said. “That seems like a pretty basic infection prevention measure.”
We need more infectious disease controls, not more casualties. Surging pandemic numbers are a warning to strengthen safety measures, not weaken them. Newsom should stop listening to hospital executives and revoke this dangerous policy now.