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Nurses don’t dispute that patients deserve compassion and respect, but many feel that their roles are misunderstood and their expertise undervalued; as Duke repeatedly told me, people don’t respect nurses like they do doctors. As a result, nurses are leaving hospitals in droves. And they’re establishing new careers, not just in health care but as creatives and entrepreneurs.

Duke argues that nurses are especially fed up and burned out. And yet, as caretakers, nobody expects them to put their physical and emotional well-being first. But that’s starting to change. Once a lone voice, Duke is now a representative one.

Nurses make up the nation’s largest body of health-care workers, with three times as many RNs as physicians

Eight months into the pandemic, Brendan House, a nursing home in Kalispell, Mont., had not had a single resident test positive for the coronavirus.

The numbers of those testing positive in the surrounding community went up by a factor of 100 compared with in the summer. At Brendan House, one positive case “turned into 10, then 50. Before you know it, we had 54 people in our long-term area who were Covid-positive and only three residents who were not positive,” a certified nursing assistant told me.

A few weeks in, though it was too late to contain the spread, the home decided to put all Covid-19 patients on the same floor.

Coronavirus mask guidance is endangering US health workers, experts say

With crucial protective gear in short supply, federal authorities are saying health workers can wear lower-grade surgical masks while treating Covid-19 patients – but growing evidence suggests the practice is putting workers in jeopardy.

But scholars, not-for-profit leaders and former regulators in the specialized field of occupational safety say relying on surgical masks – which are considerably less protective than N95 respirators – is almost certainly fueling illness among frontline health workers, who probably make up about 11% of all known Covid-19 cases.

In September, after six months of exhausting work battling the pandemic, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., voted to unionize. The vote passed with 70%, a high margin of victory in a historically anti-union state,

The nurses had originally filed paperwork to hold this vote in March but were forced to delay it when the pandemic began heating up. And the issues that had driven them toward unionizing were only heightened by the crisis. It raised new, urgent problems too, including struggles to get enough PPE, and inconsistent testing and notification of exposures to COVID-positive patients.

For months now, front-line health workers across the country have faced a perpetual lack of personal protective equipment, or PPE, and inconsistent safety measures. Studies show they're more likely to be infected by the coronavirus than the general population, and hundreds have died,

ALBANY, N.Y. — For most of the past year, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has tried to brush away a persistent criticism that undermined his national image as the man who led New York through the pandemic: that his policies had allowed thousands of nursing home residents to die of the virus.

He also asserted that the lack of data on hospital deaths of nursing home residents was due to concern and caution about the accuracy of data that nursing homes supplied — an issue also raised by the attorney general. “D.O.H. does not disagree that the number of people transferred from a nursing home to a hospital is an important data point,” he said.

The report also cast a critical eye on perhaps the governor’s most criticized decision since the beginning of the pandemic last year: a March 25 directive from the Health Department that ordered nursing homes to accept and readmit patients who had tested positive..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-c7gg1r{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:0.875rem;margin-bottom:15px;color:#121212 !important;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-c7gg1r{font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:0.9375rem;}}.css-1sjr751{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1sjr751 a:hover{border-bottom:1px solid #dcdcdc;}.css-rqynmc{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:0.9375rem;line-height:1.25rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-rqynmc{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-rqynmc strong{font-weight:600;}.css-rqynmc em{font-style:italic;}.css-yoay6m{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-yoay6m{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1dg6kl4{margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:15px;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}#masthead-bar-one{display:none;}.css-1pd7fgo{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% - 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1pd7fgo{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-1pd7fgo:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1pd7fgo{border:none;padding:20px 0 0;border-top:1px solid #121212;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:'See more';}.css-1pd7fgo[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-k9atqk{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-k9atqk strong{font-weight:700;}.css-k9atqk em{font-style:italic;}.css-k9atqk a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ccd9e3;}.css-k9atqk a:visited{color:#333;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;border-bottom:1px solid #ddd;}.css-k9atqk a:hover{border-bottom:none;}

It has been exactly one year since New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued a directive that has led to critics blaming him for thousands of nursing home deaths during the coronavirus pandemic.

Cuomo's order required nursing homes to take in residents who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 after being declared "medically stable" and forbade them from turning people away for being infected.

"No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19," the order said. "[Nursing homes] are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission."

Then came November. The numbers of those testing positive in the surrounding community went up by a factor of 100 compared with in the summer. At Brendan House, one positive case “turned into 10, then 50. Before you know it, we had 54 people in our long-term area who were Covid-positive and only three residents who were not positive,” a certified nursing assistant told me.

The facility was marked like a disaster zone: red rooms (for full isolation), yellow (recovered) and green (negative).

Long-term care continues to be understaffed, poorly regulated and vulnerable to predation by for-profit conglomerates and private-equity firms.

Belgium on Monday commemorated the heroism of British World War I nurse Edith Cavell a century after she was executed by the German forces that occupied the country.

Germany accused Cavell — the head of a nursing school in Brussels — of helping injured Britons escape, and shot her at dawn on October 12, 1915. Around much of the world she has largely been forgotten, but at the time the allied nations considered her a

Cavell was the head of a nursing school in Brussels when Germany invaded Belgium in 1914. She was sentenced in the very rooms of the Belgian senate where the commemoration took place and which the Germans had occupied during the war.

(CNN)An anesthesiologist in Arizona turned to eBay for N95 masks. A nurse in Ohio said she and her colleagues are forbidden from wearing any masks for fear that it would spread anxiety. A nursing home employee in Arkansas who developed a fever said she couldn't get tested.

The scarcity of equipment is at a critical stage, where medical workers are being asked do something that weeks ago would have brought reprimand or even termination: reuse supplies.

Although many hospitals and clinics are scrambling to refill dwindling supplies, the stories from health workers reflect a shaken American health care system that was caught flat-footed by the fast-spreading global pandemic.

Doctors and nurses responding to the Covid-19 pandemic are the superheroes of our age, putting themselves at risk to save the lives of others.

At least 61 doctors and nurses have died from the coronavirus in Italy so far. Already, in New York City alone, two nurses have died and more than 200 health workers are reported sick at a single major hospital.

Tension arises not only because of shortages of P.P.E. but also because of uncertainty about how much protection is optimal. No one knows. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have given conflicting advice, and other countries have varying standards

As of this past weekend, nine countries had diagnosed more than 9,000 cases, and three -- South Korea, Switzerland, and Germany -- had deaths rates well below the others. For South Korea, this in part is due to the cases occurring in much younger people, while the information in Switzerland is only now emerging. But for Germany, Covid-19 is being diagnosed in the same middle-aged people as other countries. The deaths in Germany also fit the seemingly established pattern of also occurring among the very old.

Recent articles have raised this issue with several theories put forth by local experts. Some feel that it is a temporary situation, since Germany, like South Korea, has been aggressively testing its population from the outset. Aggressive testing likely will identify persons otherwise too well to come to medical attention, thereby diluting the tested pool with a large set of infected but otherwise well people who are likely to remain so.

Others have speculated that the first cases in Germany were older adults who had used an early spring vacation to go skiing in countries that turned out to have high rates of Covid-19. So yes, goes this thinking: the German cases are in older persons, but all were well enough to ski, that is, they were people without the various other medical conditions that increase risk of death.

Julia Lyons portrayed herself as a busy visiting nurse in Chicago during the great flu pandemic of 1918. But “Slick Julia,” as she came to be known, was no Florence Nightingale.

The 23-year-old Julia, “a woman of diamonds and furs, silken ankles, gem-studded fingers and aliases by the dozens,” was posing as a “flu nurse,” ripping off home-bound patients for cash and jewelry as they suffered and even died, the Chicago Tribune reported in late 1918.

A century before the coronavirus crisis, the 1918 flu was a killing machine, taking the lives of more than 675,000 people in the United States and 50 million around the world.

Monday’s vaccinations, the first in a staggeringly complicated national campaign, were a moment infused with hope and pain for hundreds of America’s health care workers.

Ms. Hansen described the 5,000 frontline nurses of the Memorial Healthcare System as resilient but physically and mentally exhausted by the pandemic

Across the country, hospital auditoriums and conference rooms became makeshift vaccination sites,

Anxious about taking a new vaccine and scarred by a history of being mistreated, many frontline workers at hospitals and nursing homes are balking at getting inoculated against Covid-19.

Those opposing forces have spawned an unusual situation: In addition to educating their workers about the benefits of the Covid-19 vaccines, a growing number of employers are dangling incentives like cash, extra time off and even Waffle House gift cards for those who get inoculated, while in at least a few cases saying they will fire those who refuse.

“For us, this was not a tough decision,” said Lynne Katzmann, Juniper’s chief executive. “Our goal is to do everything possible to protect our residents and our team members and their families.”

the federal government came nowhere close to vaccinating 20 million people by the end of 2020, as it had promised.

Three weeks into the most ambitious vaccination campaign in modern U.S. history, far fewer people than expected are being immunized against Covid-19, as the process moves slower than officials had projected and has been beset by confusion and disorganization in many states.

Of the more than 12 million doses of vaccines from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. with BioNTech SE that have been shipped, only 2.8 million have been administered, according to federal figures

Among health care workers, nurses in particular have been at significant risk of contracting Covid-19, according to a new analysis of hospitalized patients by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 6 percent of adults hospitalized from March through May were health care workers, according to the researchers, with more than a third either nurses or nursing assistants.

The study looked at 6,760 hospitalizations across 13 states, including California, New York, Ohio and Tennessee.

At the Pennsylvania long-term care facility where Tisheia Frazier works, the coronavirus was a terror. During the most harrowing weeks of the pandemic in April and May, she said, four residents died in a matter of hours, and 70 people in an 180-bed unit died in less than a month.

At the height of the pandemic, he sat at his desk, a shield over his face, so frustrated by the government’s handling of the virus and his own organization's bureaucracy that he thought to himself: “I don’t want to do this.”

The deaths of almost 40 percent of all Americans killed by the coronavirus have been linked to nursing homes and similar facilities — indoor spaces crowded with vulnerable adults.

Edith Cavell worked as a nurse at the Berkendael Institute in Brussels from 1907, where she helped pioneer modern nursing techniques in Belgium.

She was arrested for treason in August 1915 for helping more than 200 Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium

In the immediate aftermath of her death, the nurse was used heavily in the British propaganda drive - a campaign that sometimes obscured the real Edith Cavell.

(CNN) — The Ayre Gran Hotel Colón is a four-star, 365-room design hotel in downtown Madrid close to Retiro Park and one of the city's largest hospitals.

With global travel at a standstill -- and millions of people projected to contract Covid-19 in the coming months -- governments around the world are looking to otherwise closed hotels as a way to alleviate stresses on overburdened health systems.

The latter was a strategy utilized by officials in Wuhan, China, who erected specialized facilities -- or in some cases, commandeered hotels -- to isolate doctors and nurses. Health workers, of course, are at a higher risk of contracting the illness and subsequently passing it on to their families or fellow commuters.

"We ended up getting our first positive patients -- and that's when all hell broke loose," said one New York City doctor.

"We don't have the machines, we don't have the beds," the doctor said.

"To think that we're in New York City and this is happening," he added. "It's like a third-world country type of scenario. It's mind-blowing."