(Snippets from the frontline)
COVID-19: Show us the numbers!
Hospital healthcare professionals are dying. Many because they do not have adequate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) like gloves, masks, gowns, shoe booties, etc.
Countless hospitals for years utilized costly public relations touting their facility provided the best care insurance could buy. Many of us in medicine recognized the hype.
Statistically with this crisis, I worry healthcare professionals on the frontline who become infected are concealed from the public to protect the hospital reputation or cash flow.
Numbers coming from east coast teaching hospitals reveal exposure problems, but I wonder at private and non-profit hospitals if this data could be buried because whistleblowing doctors and nurses have been threatened and financially silenced? Add the guise of “confidentiality” and HIPAA rules, self-serving administrators can easily hide serious and culpable information.
Hospital healthcare professionals must be protected, so Public Health Departments, local government, and other regulatory authorities must undertake careful scrutiny and demand truthful statistics.
Ask: How many doctors, nurses, and hospital employees have been exposed and are now positive? How many are in quarantine? What criteria was used allowing them back to work? Etc.
Hospitals should show us the numbers, and not jeopardize indispensable frontliners who are saving lives.
Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D.
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