Nurses, other workers in Bay Area demand improved safety conditions

Nurses rallied in San Francisco at UCSF’s Parnassus campus Friday — International Worker’s Day — as part of a national effort to protest hospital policies that force health workers to reuse masks when working with COVID19, which they say raises their risk of infection.

Around the Bay Area, nurses at five other hospitals, including Kaiser Permanente and Sutter Health campuses, joined the May Day protests.

And demonstrators from a variety of professions staged other protests against working conditions and pay, with the largest protests in San Francisco and Oakland. They climbed into cars and trucks, and mounted bikes and other vehicles to form caravans — and paraded their way up and down streets, sometimes surrounding government buildings and businesses.

Some workers at an Amazon warehouse in Richmond planned to walk out Friday morning. A Facebook organizing page said they had support from workers from Instacart, FedEx, Uber, Shipt, Lyft, UPS and more. They demanded starting salaries of $26 an hour, full medical benefits after 30 days, better training and safer conditions for drivers.

For nurses and other health workers, they said, the workplace issues were a matter of life and death.

Nurse Jamille Cabacungan took a break from treating coronavirus patients, and joined 11 other nurses protesting at UCSF. She uses N95 masks, those with the highest level of protection against infection. Before the pandemic, she threw the masks away after each use. Now, with the masks in short supply around the world, Cabacungan gets one mask a day and stores it in a paper bag between uses with differ

ent patients. She said it’s difficult to not touch the potentially contaminated outside of the mask, like UCSF instructed, to avoid exposure.

“As we do our part in this pandemic, we need access to higher standards of personal protective equipment,” Cabacungan said into a microphone on the hospital’s front lawn as a caravan of cars honking in solidarity streamed by. “We should not be taking a chance on health care workers when we are needed the most during this time . ... We are sounding this alarm because solutions must be done. Our lives depend on it.”

The pandemic has triggered global supply shortages for personal protective gear, especially N95 masks, and frontline workers fear reusing masks raises their risk of exposure.

As of Friday, 5,617 health care workers have tested positive for COVID19 across California and 31 have died, according to the state Public Health Department. County health departments and local unions said they knew of no deaths from the coronavirus among Bay Area health care workers.

At UCSF, 56 employees have tested positive, spokeswoman Kristen Bole said, adding that contact tracing indicates 13 of the cases were transmitted from patients. Most of the workers, 44, have recovered and returned to work, she said.

As with most hospitals, Bole said that UCSF is following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines for mask use, which allow workers to reuse masks when treating COVID19 patients if supplies are scarce. The guidance includes instructions for how to take on and off a mask that may be contaminated. UCSF’s policy says workers can wear the same mask for more than a day unless it’s visibly soiled.

UCSF has enough personal protective equipment for the next several weeks, even if coronavirus cases surge, said Sheila Antrum, senior vice president and chief operating officer of UCSF Health. The hospital even has enough of some supplies to offer extras to dozens of hospitals in need, she added.

The exception is N95 masks, of which UCSF Health uses on average 1,873 a day, Bole said.

The supply “remains uncertain across the country,” Antrum said. She said the hospital has enough N95s if nurses reuse them — to which they object. If workers believe they need more masks, a committee reviews that decision, she said.

“I feel comfortable as chief operating officer and interim chief nursing officer that they are doing the right things to keep staff safe,” said Antrum, standing, masked, in a hospital lobby.

UCSF had 16 COVID19 patients in the hospital Friday, and is starting to reschedule delayed surgeries, Antrum said, adding that administrators want to ensure there are enough masks available for highexposure procedures.

Since infectious disease experts believe the coronavirus is largely transmitted through respiratory droplets, UCSF has opened up isolation units with airpressure rooms for COVID19 patients in its Parnassus, Mount Zion and Mission Bay hospitals, Bole said. Containing these patients limits exposure for workers and conserves personal protective equipment, she said.

But some workers worry that’s not enough protection when people without symptoms may have the coronavirus.

Nurse Ashley Vernon, one of the protesters at UCSF Parnassus, works in various units of the hospital. Unless she is doing a highrisk procedure like intubating a patient, she wears a surgical mask, which offers less protection than the N95.

“Nurses are proud to work the front lines, but we just want to be safe,” Vernon said. San Francisco Chronicle staff writers Michael Cabanatuan, Carolyn Said and Roland Li

contributed to this report.