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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTheir neighbors called covid-19 a hoax. Can these ICU nurses forgive them?
ABINGDON, Va. - The hospital executives at the lectern called her a hero, and the struggle that had earned Emily Boucher that distinction showed on her face: in the pallor acquired over 12-hour shifts in the intensive care unit, the rings beneath eyes that watched almost every day as covid-19 patients gasped for their final breaths.
The pandemic had hit late but hard in the Appalachian highlands - the mountainous region that includes Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee - and over the winter many of its victims had ended up on ventilators tended by Boucher and her fellow nurses at Johnston Memorial Hospital.
They were enduring the traumas known to ICU workers across the world: days filled with death, nights ruined by dreams in which they found themselves at infected patients' bedsides without masks. But they were also enduring a trauma that many doctors and nurses elsewhere were not: the suspicion and derision of those they risked their lives to protect.
Conspiracy theories about the pandemic and lies recited on social media - or at White House news conferences - had penetrated deep into their community. When refrigerated trailers were brought in to relieve local hospitals' overflowing morgues, people said they were stage props. Agitated and unmasked relatives stood outside the ICU insisting that their intubated relatives only had the flu. Many believed the doctors and nurses hailed elsewhere for their sacrifices were conspiring to make money by falsifying covid-19 diagnoses.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/neighbors-called-covid-19-hoax-140128891.html
Blue_true
(31,261 posts)Basically some people believe that Covid is a hoax and even after they get sick, they attribute them getting well to prayer instead of the efforts of ICU Doctors and Nurses who used science and worked their asses off to save them. And if a patient dont beat the odds and die, the family says that it was gods will. I just dont know how you reach people like that with logic and facts, anything that happens to them good or bad is gods will, even when the bad stuff is grotesque.
NH Ethylene
(30,803 posts)I would be very angry if I was one of those ICU nurses.
OAITW r.2.0
(24,299 posts)* Accept for those medically unable to be vaccinated. Really, they are destabilizing society by prolonging the virus's presence in the USA and further endangering/overworking our healthcare front-line workers and the system itself. They are the true anti-socialists in the country today.