Each virus death teaches hard lessons for health care workers

The seriousness of the health risk sinks in when a young coworker dies after contracting the COVID-19 virus.

We heard the bad news in the morning nursing report on Monday. A registered nurse who worked with us at the Lake City VA Medical Center died at Ocala Regional Medical Center on Sunday evening. He had tested positive for the COVID-19 virus only a few weeks ago after caring for COVID-19 patients at the Lake City hospital.

A friend and fellow RN, Jason Bashaw, posted this on his own Facebook page: “I could never have imagined this strong young nurse being taken by this virus he vowed to fight. Your shift is over … we’ll take it from here.”

The deceased wasn’t a personal friend of mine — but he was a colleague. He was a colleague with an outstanding professional reputation. My understanding is that he had been healthy prior to having coronavirus symptoms.

Did he contract the virus at work? It seems likely.

He was doing honorable work in a high-risk occupation having no discernible age-risk bias. Recent data collected and analyzed by The Guardian and Kaiser Health News revealed 12% of 167 confirmed front-line healthcare worker deaths that they studied — 21 medical staff members — were under 40 years of age. While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports the median age for COVID-19-related deaths in the general population to be 78, the newsroom partnership found the median age for COVID-19 health care worker deaths was 57 — and that nurses accounted for 64 of the 167 deaths.

I’m employed as a mental health/substance-abuse rehabilitation nurse in a lowpopulation residential setting in the hospital, so I’m not nearly as high a risk for COVID-19. The census is being kept down by management in the residential setting in order to lower the risk. At any point, however, I could be moved by hospital management to a health care floor having greater risk.

Direct-care staff at nursing homes and assisted-living facilities, working on a daily, long-term basis with fragile, vulnerable seniors, are probably even at higher risk for COVID-19 than most of us hospital workers.

The nurse who died Sunday followed hospital policies. He wore the recommended personal protective equipment. He took the pandemic seriously.

Young people choosing to skip the mask and disregard the social-distancing precautions might take a tragic lesson from a nurse who did good work for our nation’s heroes.

“It’s not just going to be the elderly,” Stephen Morse, a professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told The New York Times in a story titled “Young Adults Make Up Big Portion of Coronavirus Hospitalizations in U.S.” “There will be people age 20 and up. They do have to be careful, even if they think that they’re young and healthy.”

Especially if they work in a hospital.