Via CNN, a discouraging report: The surreal lives of Arkansas nurses fighting Covid-19 inside the hospital and denial on the outside. Excerpt:
(CNN)Sunny worked as a nurse on a Covid-19 floor of a hospital at the height of the pandemic. The work was hard, but what made it surreal was doing it while living in small town Arkansas, where many people, even some in her own family, said the virus was overblown -- "just the flu."
"It's extremely difficult to watch so many people die, and then have people tell you on Facebook or in Walmart that you're a liar," Sunny said. Sometimes that would come from the loved ones of the patients she was taking care of.
"We had people accuse us of giving their loved one something else so that they would die and we could report it as Covid. We heard it more than once that we were fudging the numbers, or we were killing people on purpose to make Covid look like it was worse than it was, or to make it look real when it wasn't," she said.
Sunny asked CNN not to use her real name, because some dedicated Covid-19 deniers have harassed health care workers, or tried to get outspoken ones fired.
The politicization that led people to believe Covid-19 was some kind of scam is now affecting how many get vaccinated.
Just 36% of Arkansans are fully vaccinated, the third-lowest rate in the country. This week, Arkansas had its biggest spike in cases since February, and it has the worst case rate in the country. The state government is offering incentives to get vaccinated, like free lottery tickets. It hasn't convinced many; Gov. Asa Hutchinson has said it's not working.
Sunny fears that could mean the Delta variant will make many people in her community sick, and push some nurses to quit.
"A lot of nurses have compassion fatigue. And I am really scared of how that's gonna play out, because a lot of the cases that we're seeing are in non-vaccinated individuals."
"Nurses were really the symbol for this pandemic and all of the hate was centered around us -- the hate, the fear, the respect, all of it," Sunny said. A lot of nurses have PTSD from 2020, she said, "And now we're having people come in and look us in the face and be like, 'No I didn't get the vaccine, and now I'm sick."
