With Nearly 200,000 Dead, Health Care Workers Struggle To Endure
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2020
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It's not clear exactly how many of the dead are health care workers, who remain especially vulnerable to the virus. Dr. Claire Rezba has been tracking and documenting their deaths on Twitter.
Christopher Friese with the University of Michigan School of Nursing explains how we all feel the effects of a health care system whose workers are stretched to the brink.
NPR science correspondent Richard Harris reports on a crucial advancements health care workers have made that mean ICU patients are more likely to survive now than they were at the outset of the pandemic.
In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Before she got sick, Cheryl Morrow spent a little time every night catching up with her daughter, Tiffany, on the phone. |
| 0:07.0 | Some nights we would talk for 20-25 minutes just depends on how her day went. |
| 0:12.0 | And then sometimes it was just a call telling me good night and she talked to me tomorrow. |
| 0:17.0 | Tiffany says Cheryl's job kept her pretty busy during the week. She was a nurse at Batesville Family Practice Clinic in Arkansas. |
| 0:25.0 | She and Tiffany met up on the weekends for shopping or lunch, usually on a Sunday, until one Sunday morning in mid-August. |
| 0:33.0 | She calls me at like, I think 7-15 and she was crying and I said, Mom, what's wrong? |
| 0:38.0 | And she said, I had to go get tested for the virus and I said, OK, I said why don't you say I woke up sick? |
| 0:44.0 | And I said, it's going to be OK. I said, well wait for your results to get back, you know, and then we'll go from there. |
| 0:51.0 | The results were positive. Within a week Cheryl was in the ICU on a ventilator and she spent 13 days like that alone. |
| 1:00.0 | And then on September 5th, less than three weeks since that Sunday morning, she was dead at age 53. |
| 1:09.0 | I never thought at 31 that I'd have to bury my mama. |
| 1:15.0 | Cheryl Morrow, one of 200,000 Americans dead from the coronavirus. |
| 1:23.0 | On Sunday in Washington, DC, the bell at the National Cathedral rang out 200 times, once for every thousand people. |
| 1:33.0 | 200,000 people, that's about 20% of total deaths worldwide from the virus. |
| 1:42.0 | And the US only has about 4% of the world's population. |
| 1:47.0 | Healthcare workers remain some of the most vulnerable. |
| 1:51.0 | Just because they're a frontline worker and they're working and they haven't caught it yet, doesn't mean that they can't. |
| 2:00.0 | Consider this. We spent spring on lockdown so we could protect healthcare workers. |
| 2:06.0 | Now we're not even sure how many have died. |
| 2:09.0 | And experts are predicting a new surge of cases in the fall. |
| 2:14.0 | From NPR, I'm Audie Cornish. It's Monday, September 21st. |
| 2:19.0 | This message comes from NPR Sponsored Twilio, a customer engagement platform trusted by millions of developers enabling you to reinvent how you connect with your customers. |
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