Nurses march on White House over lack of PPE
American nurses protested outside the White House yesterday about shortages of protective equipment by reading aloud the names of 50 healthcare workers they said had died from coronavirus.
The White House has said that individual states are responsible for acquiring equipment and some have gone to extreme lengths, including Illinois sending a plane in secret to China to stock up on supplies. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, said that his Korean-born wife helped to negotiate a deal to buy 500,000 testing kits from South Korea for US$9 million (NZ$15m).
Some state governors have complained that the American free-market healthcare model lands them in international bidding wars against each other and sometimes also against the national government’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
Erica Jones, a nurse from Medstar Washington Hospital Centre, who was among the two dozen protesters outside the White House, said: ‘‘We’re here because our colleagues are dying. Right now people think of us as heroes but we’re feeling like martyrs.’’ Meanwhile the Senate passed without a formal vote the latest relief deal aimed mainly at helping small businesses worth a total of US$484 billion. It provides US$310 billion in forgivable loans to small businesses that retain staff on the payroll after US$350 billion in an earlier package ran out.
In research for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) last week, only 16 per cent of coronavirus case records listed whether or not the patient was a healthcare worker. Of these, 19 per cent (9282) of cases were health workers and 27 had died, suggesting that far more than 50 have died.
Three southern states with Republican governors announced plans to gradually ease restrictions in the coming days. South Carolina allowed shops to reopen with social distancing rules to keep shoppers six feet apart and said that local authorities could reopen beaches, although police would break up groups of three or more. Residents of Georgia will be allowed to return to the gym and get haircuts from Friday. Most businesses in Tennessee will be allowed to reopen on May 1.