National Nurses United

She is livid that Kaiser didn't err on the safe side and provide airborne protections for all the nurses right from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, all the nurses who cared for this patient wore loose surgical masks. She is livid that 10 nurses contracted COVID-19 from this patient, at least three had to be hospitalized, and one coworker devastatingly died May 24 after struggling for her life on a ventilator in the ICU for nearly two months. She is livid because all of this was avoidable. "This was yet another unnecessary death," said Arlund, a Kaiser Fresno ICU nurse and a member of the California Nurses Association and National Nurses Organizing Committee board of directors. "We told them that we didn't know enough about this virus, and that since we don't know, we needed to take every precaution. Instead of management listening to us nurses, they listened to weak government guidelines. They buckled and started hoarding and locking up supplies. We know this situation would have been prevented if the hospital had provided PPE to nurses in the telemetry unit. We hold them responsible for their failure to fully protect us, their frontline caregivers. Now it's led to this tragedy, the death of one of our own union sisters. We will never forget this." This mysterious novel virus that we first heard warnings about in early January has upended the entire world as we know it. Children were not in school learning, where they should be. By April, restaurants, bars, sports venues, and other typical social gathering places were off limits. Houses of worship sat empty. Millions of people are unemployed, families are struggling to survive and just stay housed and fed, and, all the while, nurses, doctors, and health care workers are valiantly caring for many of the more than 1.6 million people who have contracted COVID-19 and the more than 100,000 who have died. And as of this writing, more than 138 nurses and 800 other health care workers have died from COVID-19—that we know of. And, yet, from another perspective, nothing has changed— especially for nurses practicing within a money-driven health care system. As essential workers, nurses are still reporting for their shifts—though an increasing number are facing furloughs, layoffs, and reductions. Nurses are still being short staffed, without the needed number of colleagues to safely care for the patient numbers and patient acuity they are receiving. Nurses are still having to fight hospital management daily for safe workplaces, demanding the personal protective equipment (PPE), supplies, testing, staffing, and policies necessary to protect themselves, their patients, their coworkers, their families, and the wider community. After they themselves were exposed to or contracted COVID-19, nurses have had to struggle for fair treatment under employment policies and coverage under workers' compensation programs. Nurses are still having to challenge their employers to prioritize patients over profits. In short, the COVID-19 pandemic changed little about how our health care industry operated, it simply exposed the fatal folly of their existing bad practices, and the complicity of our federal, state, and local government leaders and elected officials in permitting them to do so. For the first time in a long time, people have woken up to the reality that our entire health care system is geared toward making money, not to protect or encourage the public health of our society nor to make sick people well. 10 N A T I O N A L N U R S E W W W . N A T I O N A L N U R S E S U N I T E D . O R G A P R I L | M AY | J U N E 2 0 2 0 Battling a PANDEMIC NNU nurses wage an unprecedented fight to protect their patients, themselves within a system designed for profit, not public health. BY LUCIA HWANG Amy Arlund is livid. The Kaiser Permanente Fresno Medical Center intensive care unit RN is livid that her hospital did not take proactive precautions to test a telemetry patient for COVID-19 when he was admitted in late March.

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