'The System Failed Him': VA Nurse Loses Hope As Hospitals Buckle
ACROSS AMERICA — Kristen Cline was working a 12-hour shift in October at the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Memorial Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when a code blue rang through the halls. Knowing the patient was dying from coronavirus, the nurse rushed to help, grabbing the crinkled and dirty N95 mask she had reused for days to protect herself.
Her determination wasn't enough. The patient "fell victim to a hospital in chaos," Cline said in her post-death report.
The crash cart and breathing bag that should have been in the room were missing. The patient wasn’t tethered to monitors that could have alerted nurses sooner. He had cried out for help, but the duty nurse was busy with other patients, packed two to a room meant for one.
“He died scared and alone. It didn’t have to be that way. We failed him — not the staff, we did everything we could,” Cline told ProPublica. “The system failed him.”
The system also failed her, Cline told the nonprofit newsroom. The Department of Veterans Affairs is not doing enough to protect its front-line health care workers, she said. Her complaints about inadequate personal protective equipment have fallen on deaf ears.
And while every American hospital has been stretched by the pandemic, the VA’s lack of an effective system for tracking and delivering supplies has made it particularly vulnerable, according to ProPublica's report.
“When this is over,” Cline said, “those of us who don’t die are going to quit.”
The Latest
As Americans close out the long holiday weekend, the United States recorded yet another record of new daily cases on Saturday.
More than 280,400 new cases were reported on Saturday, according to a Washington Post database. While the number seems staggering, it could also be distorted. According to a New York Times report, 19 states reported no data on New Year's Day. The near doubling of cases a day later can mostly be explained by many states reporting cases for both Friday and Saturday. One state, Michigan, reported cases for Thursday as well.
While total U.S. cases have now exceeded 20.4 million, the number of lives lost to the coronavirus also surpassed 350,000 on Sunday. As families grieve, funeral homes are once again being forced to turn them away as states deal with a crippling rise in deaths.
California is among the states hardest hit. The head of the state funeral directors association told The Associated Press that mortuaries are being inundated, and some funeral home owners are saying they've never experienced anything like it.
“I’ve been in the funeral industry for 40 years and never in my life did I think that this could happen, that I’d have to tell a family, ‘No, we can’t take your family member,’" Magda Maldonado, owner of Continental Funeral Home in Los Angeles, told The AP.
On Sunday, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said a new confirmed case is being reported in the county every six seconds.
“This is something now that really is spreading in the home,” Garcetti said on "Face The Nation, adding, “It’s a message for all of America: We might not all have the same density as L.A., but what’s happening in L.A. can and will be coming in many communities in America.”
As America leaves the holidays behind, some public health officials are still fearing what's to come: gatherings that no doubt will fuel a new surge of illness and death.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said on "Meet The Press" that what's to come is "terrible" but it's also predictable.
It's predictable likely because American airports recorded their busiest day of the pandemic on Saturday, with nearly 1.2 million passengers passing through security checkpoints, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Since Dec. 18, the agency has counted more than 16.3 million trips through its airport checkpoints, down from more than 35.4 million in the same period a year ago. Tens of millions more people were also expected to travel by car, the New York Times reported.
On Sunday, a top official for Operation Warp Speed floated one possible solution to protect Americans: halving the dose of each Moderna vaccine to potentially double the number of people who could receive it.
Data from Moderna’s clinical trials showed that people between the ages of 18 and 55 who received two 50-microgram doses showed an “identical immune response” to the standard of two 100-microgram doses, said Dr. Moncef Slaoui.
Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida, agreed that there might be more data to support a vaccine strategy that relied on half-doses rather than delayed doses.
“There is a path forward if you can show that two lower doses yield a similar immune response,” Dean told the New York Times.
So far, federal officials have failed to outline a plan for distributing vaccines to U.S. states. Meanwhile, overworked, underfunded state public health departments are scrambling to patch together plans for administering vaccines.
Amid the different approaches, a multitude of logistical concerns have complicated the process, leading to long lines, confusion, frustration and jammed phone lines.
Terry Beth Hadler, a 69-year-old piano teacher stood in line overnight with hundreds of other senior citizens outside a library in Bonita Springs, Florida, waiting to get her shot. They were offered on a first-come, first-served basis to people over 65.
She wouldn't do it again. A brawl nearly broke out just before dawn when someone cut in the line. She also worried that she was in the middle of a superspreader event.
"I was petrified," she told The AP.
Newest Numbers
At least 2,353 deaths and 280,497 new cases of coronavirus were reported in the United States on Sunday, according to a Washington Post database. The Post's reporting shows that over the past week new daily cases increased by 12.6 percent, new daily deaths rose by 16.8 percent and new coronavirus-related hospitalizations increased by 5.4 percent.
Currently, there are more than 123,600 people hospitalized with a coronavirus-related illness in the United States, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
As of Sunday, 47 states and Puerto Rico remained above the positive testing rate recommended by the World Health Organization to safely reopen. To safely reopen, the WHO recommends states remain at 5 percent or lower for at least 14 days.
As of Sunday afternoon, the United States had reported more than 20.5 million cases and more than 351,200 deaths from COVID-19-related illnesses, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
Stay up to date on the latest coronavirus news via The New York Times or Washington Post.
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This article originally appeared on the Across America Patch
