As hospitals fill up, traveling nurses rush to virus hotspots



[ad_1]

“I’m taking care of this man and he said, ‘I can’t wait until the election is over for all of this to go away,” she said. “And I’m like,’ This is not happening. ‘is real, I promise you, it is real. “

Others almost shrug their shoulders when they test positive for the coronavirus.

“A lot of people tend to get the answer, when you tell them they have it, they say, ‘Oh, I have the Covid,'” said Heather Ozmun, 46, a travel nurse in Green Bay. . “They treat it like a rite of passage, like it’s their turn to have it.

John Deaton, 27, has spent most of his nursing career so far as a traveler, as they are commonly referred to.

Throughout the pandemic, he has treated Covid-19 patients and even caught a mild case of the virus himself, working in El Centro, Calif., Near the border with Mexico; Sacramento; and now Green Bay.

Places to stay in Northeastern Wisconsin were hard to find. He was content to rent out the basement of a house while the owner lives upstairs, negotiating for shared use of the kitchen so that he had more than a microwave to use for cooking.

Mr Deaton, who is from Akron, Ohio, was drawn to travel nursing because it pays so well – he estimated he would earn four times what he would earn if he accepted a position somewhere. There is a range of pay for such work, but a weekly paycheck could be over $ 5,000 during the pandemic, some nurses estimate, in addition to benefits.

[ad_2]

Source link