Anxiety rising for health workers
As Connecticut sees its second virus wave, exhaustion and fear intensify
As COVID-19 surges in Connecticut once again, Sherri Dayton, a registered nurse at the Plainfield Emergency Care Center, is dreading the coming winter. For months, she has diligently cared for severely ill COVID-19 patients, terrified of bringing the virus home herself. Every day, she seeks out news on how soon a vaccine could arrive. Mostly, the pandemic feels interminable.
“As the numbers go up, so does my anxiety level,” said Dayton, 46. “I have a lot of friends who are just exhausted.”
With COVID-19 rates climbing across the state, day-to-day life in local hospitals has become increasingly tense, officials and staff there say, with conditions resembling what they experienced during last spring’s initial surge.
Dr. Tom Balcezak, chief clinical officer at Yale New Haven Health, said it feels “like mid-to-late March” in the hospitals, as coronavirus patients take up more and more beds. He said improved protocols make life somewhat less frenzied than it was in the spring but that the seeming endlessness of the pandemic takes a toll.
“The fact that the light at the end of the tunnel is not really until spring, when we’re going to be able to vaccinate enough of our population — people are looking at that and they’re exhausted,” Balcezak said. “They’re exhausted because of what they’ve been through. They’re frustrated because the normal wayposts of life — holidays, families, get-togethers — they’re all gone. And I think they’re tired because of that. They’re
sad because of that.”
Dayton and Balcezak are two of the thousands of hospital employees in Connecticut — doctors, nurses, technicians, therapists, social workers, custodians, cleaning staff and many more — for whom the pandemic is personal day after day.
‘Fear is such a common feeling’
After largely containing COVID19 over the summer, Connecticut is deep into a second surge of the disease. As of Wednesday, the state had 968 patients hospitalized with the coronavirus, up from only 42 in mid-August. According to statistical models, Connecticut will soon near or surpass its numbers from last spring, when nearly 2,000 residents were hospitalized at once and health officials scrambled to build auxiliary sites and triage tents.
During the spring surge, Crystal Bennett, 27, was running on adrenaline. An assistant patient services manager on a surgical floor of Yale New Haven Hospital’s St. Raphael campus that became a COVID-19 unit, Bennett said the work was grueling but that she and other health care workers drew strength from an outpouring of public support.
Now, eight months after COVID19 first hit the state, things are different. Schools, restaurants and stores remain open. Officials and experts warn of “pandemic fatigue” in the general public — the sense that some residents have let social distancing and mask-wearing protocols slip.
After returning to surgical work this summer, Bennett’s unit switched back to caring for COVID-19 patients a few weeks ago.
“When the second wave hit and we were told we’d be converting to a COVID unit a second time, that felt a lot more raw,” she said.
Many of the forty health care workers staffing her 24-bed unit are worn out, she said. Nurses, technicians and unit clerks have had to adjust to the reality that, once again, their risk of being exposed to COVID-19 — and endangering loved ones — will significantly increase.
“Going into the holidays, that was a difficult realization, but I think it’s something that we all had to adjust to,” she said.
In Connecticut and nationwide, while many Americans have had to cancel or adjust Thanksgiving plans, many health care workers have it worse: They’re left to work longer and more stressful hours than ever, during a time they might normally be able to spend time with friends and family.
Keith Grant, senior director of infection prevention at Hartford HealthCare, said for that reason the current wave of COVID-19 has been “more challenging mentally, more excruciating mentally than the first [wave].”
Fo r B e n n e t t , p r o v i d i n g emotional support for her team has meant serving as a sympathetic ear and connecting staff members with crucial resources, like employee assistance programs or support from the chaplain or social worker who make rounds. She said she remains impressed by her team’s dedication and endurance.
“Fear is such a common feeling right now. It creates a lot of hesitation. Talking through what people are particularly afraid of has been really important,” she said.
Emotionally taxed
One emergency room physician in Fairfield County, who asked not
to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly by his employer, said there are days “when it feels like every patient has COVID and many of them are very, very sick.”
Unlike in the spring, when many non-COVID-19 patients seemed to avoid hospitals, the doctor said the ER is now managing its normal load of visitors, plus a wave of coronavirus patients. This, he said, can be “emotionally taxing” beyond even what ER staff is accustomed to.
The doctor said he’s been surprised to see not only older patients with serious comorbidities but also people in their 30s, 40s and 50s with few or no preexisting health issues.
“The general public seems to underappreciate how many relatively young and relatively healthy people are severely affected and are dying from this,” he said.
Dayton, the Plainfield nurse, said it is particularly challenging to see young and otherwise healthy patients arrive in the throes of the virus, with dangerously low oxygen levels and heart rates that are all too high.
“It’s not easy to see sick people every single day, all day, and not feel like you can save them,” she said. “There are a lot of health care professionals dealing with PTSD and seeking out counseling by Zoom.”
An additional source of strain is that Backus Hospital, which Plainfield is part of, has struggled with staffing issues, said Dayton, who is the president of the Backus Federation of Nurses, AFT Local 5149. Last month, nurses at Backus Hospital, part of the Hartford Healthcare system, went on strike to push for better conditions. Their union ultimately ratified a four
year contract that provides pay raises and better personal protective equipment.
“We need more hands, more bodies to take care of the high census, the high acuity,” Dayton said. “We need to monitor their hearts. We have to monitor their lungs. We have to do more frequent assessments on them. We have to keep a closer eye on them.”
A worrisome path
For the Fairfield County physician, following the news has brought its own type of helplessness.
As the doctor has watched more and more sick patients show up in the ER, he’s grown increasingly frustrated at Gov. Ned Lamont’s reluctance to impose stricter control measures, such as a ban on indoor dining. Instead of clamping down to halt the virus early in its trajectory of exponential growth, the doctor worries, officials have let it spread beyond hope of containment.
“The major extra stress in the past couple months came from my sense that we’re letting the hardearned gains of the last several months slip away,” he said. “At this point I’ve pretty much given up on the idea we’re going to control it in Connecticut.”
The governor has so far capped private gatherings at 10 people and forced restaurants to close by 10 p.m. but has not halted indoor dining or closed gyms and places of worship, as governors elsewhere have done.
Lamont has said he will impose more restrictions if Connecticut gets closer to its spring level of hospitalizations, a little more than twice the current total. But the ER doctor worries that attitude underestimates the stress on hospitals and patients that comes when they’re forced to turn surgical recovery areas into intensive care spaces and treat patients in auxiliary tents.
“In my mind, that should be the path of last resort and certainly not the path you plan for,” the doctor said. “Really, that should be if it’s become totally unavoidable. I wouldn’t say you should plan that it’s OK to keep things like indoor dining functioning with the idea that you can set up a tent to care for patients to pick up the slack.”
Most health professionals have declined to weigh in publicly on whether Connecticut could benefit from new restrictions, such as those imposed in neighboring Rhode Island, which will soon begin a two-week “pause” on indoor dining, gyms and other indoor activities.
“That’s a tough question,” Balcezak said. “While the elected leaders are going to make the call about whether we should restrict further, it needs to be coupled with local responsibility and responsibility among citizens about gathering.”
Safety concerns
Rachael Steinway-D’Ostilio, 26, worked as a psychiatric technician at Rockville General Hospital’s eating disorder unit at the beginning of the pandemic. She was called off work earlier this summer when the unit was closed, though she is still technically employed by the hospital.
In recent months, she has found work caring for children with developmental disorders, she said. And she has considered picking up shifts at Rockville, but worries about her own safety and the health of those around her, especially with Connecticut’s recent COVID-19 spike.
“We only need one person to come into the unit and spread it around, and it will be five days, possibly, that they’ve got it and have symptoms, and another three days to get their results telling them,” she said. “In those eight days, they could have spread it, and those people that got it could be spreading it as well.”
Steinway-D’Ostilio, the interim president of RGH Licensed Practical Nurses and Technical Employees United, said she is concerned that returning to the hospital could mean endangering those she lives with or her elderly mother.
“I have roommates, and if I get them sick, they won’t be able to go to work either,” she said. “And then what will they do?”