“Different Policies Wouldn’t Have Prevented Coronavirus — But They Would Have Improved Our Response”
Just months after emergency room staff went on strike to protest their lack of resources, Paris’s hospitals are having to skimp on masks and thermometers. We spoke to frontline health workers about how they’re coping with the pandemic — and how years of underinvestment is making their job harder.
Staff wear protective equipment in the Diaconat Roosevelt Clinic, which has a special ward for coronavirus patients, in Mulhouse, France. The country’s Grand Est region, which includes the town of Mulhouse, has been particularly badly affected. (Veronique de Viguerie / Getty Images)
As a nurse in the infectious disease ward of a major Paris hospital, Marie is on the front lines of the battle against COVID-19. Over the past few weeks, dozens of new patients with the virus have arrived in her unit, medical students and nurses from other wards have been called in as reinforcements, and strict new precautionary measures have been imposed for hospital staffers.
As the human toll mounts, so too has workplace stress. “Fortunately, we’re a solid team, we can talk about it, and it’s what keeps us going,” says Marie (she declined to provide her last name — France imposes strict limits on civil servants’ right to divulge work-related issues and publicly criticize management). But, she says, “there are some difficult moments.”
Veteran nurses like Marie have seen their fair share of illnesses. But even they have been surprised by how quickly the virus can escalate — an observation shared by health experts from Wuhan to Brooklyn. “We have patients who deteriorate quite suddenly, and we don’t understand why,” she says. “I had a patient I was giving an IV to, we were talking, and a half-hour later I sent him to the ICU. He couldn’t breathe by himself anymore. They intubated him as soon as he got to the ICU. These are moments that aren’t so easy.”
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