ANOTHER Filipina nurse was in international news reports Thursday.
The first was May Parsons, one of the nearly 20,000 Filipino nurses on the staff of the Britain’s National Health Service, who injected the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine shot into Margaret Keenan, 90, last Tuesday. It was the start of the world vaccination program that is expected to end the pandemic which has ravaged the whole world the last 12 months.
A day later, in the United States, another Filipina nurse – Flor Maylyn Roz – was in the news when popular US television host Ellen Degeneres surprised her with a gi of a new car which she personally delivered to her home in Los Angeles, California.
Originally from Cebu, Flor had contracted COVID-19 last March while working with other frontline nurses and other medical personnel taking care of COVID patients in a Los Angeles hospital. She went right back to work after she recovered.
The pandemic, she said, had affected her family financially, along with many other American families. “Right now, me and my husband share a car. If I don’t have the car, I sometimes ask my co-workers to pick me up and I walk. Or sometimes, I take Uber.” Asked what it’s like to be a frontliner in the ongoing pandemic, she said she was “honored just being there for people she is taking care of.”
Degeneres said she found her work “amazing” and thanked her for her services, as she personally delivered a new car to her home.
The next day, Degeneres found she had COVID-19. She announced she had tested positive but she was “feeling fine right now.” In an Instagram post, she said: “I’ll see you all again a er the holidays. Please stay healthy and safe.”
Filipino nurses have become part of many foreign health systems in the world, notably in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. These Filipino health workers on the frontlines of the worldwide hospital effort to care for pandemic victims have themselves been among the hardest hit groups, suffering high death rates.
The pandemic is far from over. The vaccination has begun in the United Kingdom and with the approval the other day of the same Pfizer vaccine in the US, it will also soon begin in that country which has become the epicenter of the pandemic.
World attention has naturally focused on the millions of infections and deaths. But in these two reports from the UK and the US, we are glad the role of Filipino nurses and other health workers was acknowledged in the work of May Parsons in Britain and Flor Maylyn Roz in the US.
