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Comment by dubya | Hacker News Reader

Third-hand knowledge, but a neighbor who is an ER doctor is always complaining that many nurses do not take PPE and Covid seriously despite seeing hundreds of seriously ill people this past year.

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Presumably, the vast majority of the nurses working now have either already contracted and recovered from COVID, and are now likely immune, or gone through months of heavy exposure without consequence. I’m not particularly surprised they aren’t taking it as seriously as we may expect at this point.

I was pretty shocked to start poking around and see that most frontline COVID workers have not contracted the virus yet. I even saw a study that indicated that nurses were more likely to have contracted the virus through social contact outside of work than through contact at work. Apparently PPE is really working well.

It also probably helps that by the time patients are hospitalized they're likely past their most contagious point.

My partner and I happened to be at the hospital around April time frame, and even though they had PPE-adorned people at the entrance taking temperatures and logging data, I was surprised how many nurses were not wearing masks, and indeed neither did our doctor. May have changed since then, but it felt like peak panic (of the unknown) was strongest in my area closer to the initial outbreak. While more people wear masks now, my perception is that there is far less concern about COVID. I'm curious what is responsible for that - fatigue, fatalism, survivor's recklessness?

I expect fatigue might be a big part of it. Regular people are feeling it, and health care workers are not immune to it.

Having said that, I've been going to a hospital twice a week for the past few months for allergy shots, and everyone is strictly masked and distanced. Two examples of strictness details: nurses will open and close doors for me so I don't have to touch them. And once they had me take an allergy medication before getting my shot, and the nurse actually left the room while I had my mask off taking the pill.

Having said that, I go running in my neighborhood, usually through part of the campus of a (different) hospital. I regularly see people in scrubs with hospital IDs walking to the parking lot (within a few feet of me if I didn't avoid them) with their masks pulled down off their faces.

So seems there's quite a bit of variation.

Could it be because they saw cases of other nurses or doctors using PPE still getting it because of the amount of exposure?

That makes even less sense. The solution is to be adopt stricter controls not less.

Hospitals in my area enforcing higher levels of PPE are having problems with staffing because of PPE fatigue and staff don’t get sick less then hospitals with less PPE.

Lots of people die every year in car accidents while wearing a seatbelt.

Which is why I stopped wearing a seatbelt.

Lots of people are saved every year in car accidents while wearing a seatbelt. Which is why I wear a seatbelt.

And why should they? The mortality is ridiculously low

So they don't spread it to their patients?

In 2020, COVID-19 was the 3rd leading cause of death in the United Staes - behind heart disease and cancer. It's the only cause of death in the top 5 that's transmissible from person to person.

People watch what they eat to avoid heart disease and wear seatbelts to prevent dying in car accidents. Why not wear PPE to prevent COVID-19?

You should use PPE but don't say it prevents covid. If that were true then it would have been under control long ago.

PPE reduces transmission. It doesn't stop it.

Those deaths are almost all among the extremely old or extremely unhealthy. Consider that that vast majority of doctors and nurses are neither.

Long term morbidity?

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