{"id":6123,"date":"2024-03-19T21:54:40","date_gmt":"2024-03-20T02:54:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/?p=6123"},"modified":"2024-03-20T07:17:30","modified_gmt":"2024-03-20T12:17:30","slug":"health-workers-fear-its-profits-before-protection-as-cdc-revisits-airborne-transmission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/2024\/03\/19\/health-workers-fear-its-profits-before-protection-as-cdc-revisits-airborne-transmission\/","title":{"rendered":"Health workers fear it’s profits before protection as CDC revisits airborne transmission"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NBC<\/a> The agency is developing a crucial set of guidelines that health care facilities will use to control the spread of infectious diseases for years to come. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four years after hospitals in New York City overflowed with Covid patients, emergency physician Dr. Sonya Stokes remains shaken by how unprepared and misguided the American health system was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hospital leadership instructed health workers to forgo protective N95 masks in the early months of 2020, as covid cases mounted. \u201cWe were watching patients die,\u201d Stokes said, \u201cand being told we didn\u2019t need a high level of protection from people who were not taking these risks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Droves of front-line workers fell sick<\/a> as they tried to save lives without proper face masks and other protective measures. More than 3,600 died in the first year. \u201cNurses were going home to their elderly parents, transmitting Covid to their families,\u201d Stokes recalled. \u201cIt was awful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Across the country, hospital leadership cited advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on the limits of airborne transmission. The agency\u2019s early statements backed employers\u2019 insistence that N95 masks, or respirators, were needed only during certain medical procedures conducted at extremely close distances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such policies were at odds with doctors\u2019 observations, and they conflicted with advice from scientists<\/a> who study airborne viral transmission<\/a>. Their research suggested that people could get Covid after inhaling SARS-CoV-2 viruses suspended in teeny-tiny droplets in the air as infected patients breathed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ignoring this body of research was convenient at a time when N95s masks were in short supply and expensive, said Peg Seminario, an occupational health expert, and a former director at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, which represents some 12 million workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, she and many others worry that the CDC is repeating past mistakes as it develops a crucial set of guidelines that hospitals, nursing homes, prisons, and other facilities that provide health care will apply to control the spread of infectious diseases. The guidelines update those established nearly two decades ago. They will be used to establish protocols and procedures for years to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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NBC The agency is developing a crucial set of guidelines that health care facilities will use to control the spread of infectious diseases for years to come. Four years after hospitals in New York City overflowed with Covid patients, emergency physician Dr. Sonya Stokes remains shaken by how unprepared and misguided the American health system […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured-headlines"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6123"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6124,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6123\/revisions\/6124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unmc.edu\/healthsecurity\/transmission\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}