● Health care capacity must be expanded, and people must be able to get treatment they need if they contract COVID-19— at no cost. Any vaccine developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars must also be provided to the U.S. public for free when needed.
● CDC, WHO, OSHA guidelines and standards must be strengthened. The risk for airborne transmission of the virus is increasingly documented. Nurses demand that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization strengthen their guidelines accordingly. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) must also pass an emergency temporary standard for infectious diseases to mandate that health care employers provide protections needed for COVID-19.
● Public health infrastructure must be strengthened to include sufficient staffing, supplies, and space for robust surveillance, testing, case isolation, and contact tracing to ensure that the virus is effectively contained. The same April 10 to June 24 survey mentioned above showed that 80 percent of nurses had still not been tested for COVID-19.
● Health care capacity and preparedness must focus on human need, not profit. This pandemic has exposed underlying problems in our society, and has illuminated the damage done by economic policies that benefit our for-profit health care system, instead of human beings. Nurses have seen health care services for communities of color shuttered in recent months, as wealthy hospital corporations use COVID-19 as an excuse to close less profitable services. Nurses say the health care needs of all patients must be a priority before states can reopen.
● Basic human needs must be met. People in America must have enhanced unemployment benefits and paid sick time and family leave; food security; housing; health care; and other social supports for people who are unemployed or unable to work due to illness or quarantine and isolation measures. Nurses say this is especially critical for African American and in many areas Latino patients, who have died of COVID-19 in numbers as high as three to four times the rate of whites, and have lost jobs in greater percentages since March.
Nurses reiterate that now is a time to reenvision how our economy is organized. Too many federal, state, and local leaders have prioritized businesses’ profits over the public’s health in their rush to reopen at all costs and without proper preparation, say nurses, putting many workers, especially workers of color, at high risk of contracting COVID-19.
Castillo emphasizes that, “Our federal and state governments can’t just say, ‘The country is open again!’ without fully addressing the root of the problem. The virus is still out there. Opening back up—as if we have addressed it, without taking the clear steps nurses have outlined for months to actually mitigate its spread—will only continue to sicken and kill our patients.”
Back to HCB News
