“The next coronavirus crisis will be a shortage of doctors and nurses” – so ran a report last Thursday in the United States where the COVID-29 pandemic continued to spread such that it is expected to surpass all other countries in the number of cases.
With the fast-rising number of cases, the strain is rising on the doctors and nurses of US hospitals. They reported shortages of protective gear, lax protocols, and a fast-rising level of stress. Said one doctor: “When I’m going to work, I could endanger me and my family…. “The hospital could only say it was getting a large influx of COVID-19 patients and it continues to implement measures to increase capacity, such as setting up triage tents, reassignment of beds and units, cancellation of elective surgeries, use of telemedicine, and conserving supplies, including personal protective equipment, in the expectation that the pandemic will continue to worsen.
The World Health Organization said it has found that health care workers may not actually be more at risk of infection than other people, but the experience in China was that these workers were getting sicker than expected and one theory was that medical staff are exposed to high levels of the virus as they interfaced with patients in hospitals.
This growing problem of health workers in the frontlines of the war on COVID-19 is of great concern to many families in the Philippines because so many of the nurses in American hospitals today are from the Philippines. Filipino nurses are the largest group of internationally educated nurses in the United States, partly because of the close relations between the US and the Philippines and the common notion that Filipina nurses are more caring to patients.
With the increasing strain on health care workers in US hospitals, there is a growing move to get reinforcements from abroad but the Trump administration has not given its approval. One company specializing in recruiting nurses for US hospitals said it has received a request for 5,000 nurses in New York. Several southern and western states – California, Texas, Florida, and Georgia – were said to have worsening shortages because of the coronavirus.
The Philippines could significantly ease the shortage, said Leo-Felx M. Jurado, board member of the Philippine Nurses Association of America. There are now 150,000 Filipino nurses in the US, he said, up from about 120,000 in 2013, but it is now harder in the Trump administration to get people in.
But the State Department appeared to be “opening the door a little,” according to one report. It urged medical professionals with approved visa petitions or certificates of eligibility in exchange visitor programs, “particularly those working to treat or mitigate the effects of COVID-19,” to seek a visa appointment at the nearest US embassy.
We are now closely following developments on the pandemic in the US and in other countries around the world. We hope that it will soon abate, especially since so many of our people – our nurses – are in the frontlines of the war on COVID-19 in the US.
