on the front lines

By MT Chu

Covid-19 has been taking lives and impacting the entire world. And the people who have always looked after our health have been impacted by it especially hard.

Front-liners, health workers, and anyone else with them are risking their lives everyday just by trying to provide for their families and themselves. A lot of nurses have quit their life threatening jobs because of the pandemic, but those who stayed do it for a reason.

Christina is a physician's assistant working closely with nurses and doctors in the central valley of California. Christina was born in San Jose and grew up in Milpitas. She is a medical provider that works under the supervision of a doctor, but still independently. And like a doctor, she prescribes medications, diagnoses, and treats patients at her clinic.

She works at a family clinic for almost 40 hours in a week and sometimes she has to bring her work home with her. Working as a health provider can be dangerous sometimes because Christina and her coworkers often treat patients with Covid.

“[None] have passed away, but most of my colleagues have gotten Covid since the pandemic started,” she said.

Christina is extremely lucky to have healthy coworkers who have recovered, but for others that's not the case. In fact some health workers have been through the worst case scenarios, filipino nurses especially have faced the most.

Nurses from the Philippines are extremely sought after, ever since the benevolent assimilation policy was passed in the 1890s. Assimilation in this case means that the Philippines agrees to fully learn and absorb US culture and language. This was just used to justify the invasion of the Philippines under the excuse of benevolence.

Because the policy was passed, an american nursing curriculum was brought to the Philippines. Since then estimated, “150,000 have migrated overseas to the US since the 1960s,” says Catherine Cenzia Choy, a professor of ethnic studies at Berkeley.

And now with this pandemic, Filipino nurses are becoming more and more popular in the medical field. But the data just doesn’t make sense, how are so many filipino nurses disproportionately passing away from Covid-19?

The CNN article, “Covid-19 is taking a devastating toll on Filipino American nurses,” states that, “A third of nurses who passed from covid are filipino, even though they are 4% of the nursing population nationwide.”

The safety of health workers and nurses should be prioritized because they are on the frontlines of this pandemic. But some nurses should be prioritized more because the chances of them dying while doing their job is higher. If no one was purposefully collecting the data of nurses who have passed from covid-19 maybe the nurses who are alive might have not gotten the protection and special treatment that they need.

Jollene Levid, the owner of the filipino memorial website, “Kanlungan,” talks about how filipino nurses and health workers are dying at an alarming rate due to the pandemic.

She says, “three times as many Filipino health care workers have died here in the US than in the Philippines.” This just goes to show that there is something wrong with the current healthcare system, something that is causing this increasing rate of deaths.

The reason behind the disproportionate deaths has to do with unfairness in the healthcare system. Jennifer Nazareno from Brown’s University of public health says that, “Philippine-trained nurses were disproportionately in the ICUs, the emergency rooms, in long-term care facilities such as nursing homes, compared to White, US-trained nurses.” Because of this the higher ups at health facilities should look at the data and provide more protection for filipino nurses and place them in safer work situations.

At the end of the day, behind all of the statistics and numbers are real people just like us. These health workers put themselves at risk just by trying to provide for themselves and to feed the hungry back at home.

We should provide more protection for filipino nurses now and raise awareness about this situation to possibly save someone’s mother, sister, and most importantly a human being.

Krystle, a filipino nurse in critical care shares her experience being on the frontlines of the pandemic while being a mother of two kids. Her motivation for going to work everyday is her passion for helping others and her family waiting back at home.

“I’m really blessed to be able to save lives,” she shared.

But at the same time the pandemic also brought hardships she never faced before. The pandemic has changed the lives of many healthcare workers and even taken some.

Krystle shared that pandemic has pushed her limits, “[It has] made me experience feeling burnt out and I've never seen so many deaths in a short period of time before.”

Nurses go underappreciated by the general public, people just don’t realize the risks and the hardships that come with the job. With Krystle’s experience she has to wear the same mask for over 24 hours and sometimes she has to wear the same shield for over multiple days. In Krystles hospital they care for really sick covid patients so they barely allow visitors to come in. The nurses job is to go into the patient's room with proper PPE on and speak back with the doctor afterwards.

But their job isn’t just to physically care for the patient but also emotionally support the dying patients and their family. “we’re there to be for the patients when family cannot, and it just takes a mental and physical toll on us especially during the pandemic,” said Krystle.

Such a big responsibility and burden a lot of health workers and nurses know about and can relate to. Most patients die alone with no one at bedside, but before that some of the patients get to see their family one last time on facetime but it isn’t the same as them being there in person. A lot of young dying patients have little kids at home waiting for them to recover and come back but Krystle realizes the heartbreaking truth that some of them won’t ever come home again.

Another sad reality is that some grandparents that get placed into care contracted covid because someone threw a party or attended a public gathering. A lot of those suffering grandparents aren’t able to let go because their families feel guilty for giving covid to them in the first place so they ask the hospitals to keep the grandparents alive for as long as possible.

With all of the deaths and suffering Krystle had to witness as a nurse on the frontlines she made one final comment, “Don't be selfish, wear a mask because you just don’t know who you could infect.”

We can do more for all the nurses putting themselves in danger by only going covid testing when it’s really necessary and refrain from throwing parties and attending gatherings. By participating in the spread of Covid-19 you are basically in-directly participating in the killing of health workers who just want to save lives and the patients they are taking care of.

When you are spreading covid-19 and selfishly puting lives in danger, think about health workers who are on the frontlines of the pandemic just trying to save lives. People like Christina who moved to an unfamiliar community with no family or friends just for the sole purpose of trying to provide medically for people in need and possibly save lives. “My motivation is coming from a low income and underserved community,” says Christina. Her hard work pays off when she experiences life saving situations where, “patients were about to pass away from very serious illnesses but we were able to catch on to it and prevent it.” Life saving and other hopes and dreams is what drives Christina, Krystle, and other nurses and health workers all over the world to keep fighting on the life threatening front lines.