Nurses deal with patients who think COVID-19 is a hoax

In the spring, Michelle Schultz had a particularly difficult COVID-19 patient. The man, who was in his sixties, had come to the emergency room out of breath a few days earlier. Even though his oxygen levels were quite low, he refused to take medication and wanted to leave the Indiana hospital without a mask. The nurse and some of his colleagues tried to convince him to stay, but the man insisted he was feeling fine. Also, he said, COVID-19 is a bogus virus that hospitals use to make money. As he put on his MAGA hat and walked out, she worried about what was going to happen next. Would he infect others? Will he go to bed and not wake up?

“We’ve never had people who thought we were lying to them,” said Schultz, who asked to be identified by her middle name to protect her privacy. “We have the impression that the public does not trust us anymore.”

On November 14, a South Dakota nurse named Jodi Doering wrote a viral Twitter thread about his experience treating COVID patients in intensive care units who called the virus a hoax (“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t happen. This isn’t real,’ a- she told CNN.) And while her story has been criticized for being extreme (and possibly distorted), it has pointed to a real crisis in hospitals across the country, especially in the Red States where governors have refused. the mask warrants and the president’s false claims about the virus are considered gospel. In interviews with the Cut, 12 nurses described treating patients refusing COVID, from those who simply refused treatment to those who spat or coughed on them and recited conspiracy theories about the virus.

Nurses have been ranked as the most trusted professionals for almost two decades – they are now punching bags for those who think they are lying about the pandemic. In the spring they were applauded as heroes, but many have reached a breaking point and want to quit a job they love.

Like any nurse who works in ICUs and emergency rooms, LeToya Edmonds is used to dealing with people who are angry and in denial. But while these are normal emotional responses to a serious diagnosis, Edmonds says the hostility and disbelief of his COVID-19 patients in Lawton, Oklahoma, is different.

“A lot of them make it a political issue,” she said. “It’s really hard to treat patients like that.”

Gigi Perez, a nurse at a hospital in Lancaster, Calif., Recently treated a man for a non-COVID-related injury that harassed her because she was wearing her N95. “You must be a Democrat or something,” he said and told her to take off the mask. “People are brainwashed beyond belief and choose to believe a politician over those fighting the pandemic,” she says.

Before each shift, Edmonds prepares for critical care patients who watch Fox News and spit right-wing talking points. While many skeptics believe in the virus once they are diagnosed, others double down. About a month ago, she politely asked a 70-year-old man with COVID-19 who had a fever and diarrhea to cover his mouth. He pointed to the television, where he was watching Fox, and told him that “the news says these masks don’t work”, before coughing in his face. A Florida-based respiratory therapist has also described being coughed and spat out by patients who did not take the virus seriously. “It makes my blood boil,” Edmonds said. “It’s just a constant and difficult battle.”

Even though patients don’t outright deny the reality of a virus that has killed more than 250,000 Americans, many patients and their families still don’t take it seriously. Nurses say they have never seen so much backsliding, with people disputing their test results, refusing treatment like plasma therapy or oxygen, leaving the ICU before they recover. Carla, a nurse at a family practice in North Carolina who asked for a pseudonym for fear of losing her job, said a patient told her, “I don’t believe in any of this” and “I don’t. not that shit, ”after she said they had to stay home for 14 days. She has had other dropouts due to being required to take a COVID-19 test, which they called “stupid” and refused to do so.

“I cried a lot,” she says. “It’s almost like a grieving process. I mourn the loss of what I had before: patients who listened to me and trusted me.

Of course, the consequences are real. In April, Edmonds had a patient in her 80s who did not believe her diagnosis of COVID-19 and refused all treatment. Although she developed a mild fever, the family supported her decision to leave the hospital and put her in a nursing home; she died two weeks later.

Nurses find it difficult to deal with their resilient patients. Some say they counter disinformation factually with science – this is how the virus works, this is how we treat it – and if there is a denial, they do not engage or tell the patient that they respectfully disagree. Others take a more emotional approach, trying to change their mind with blunt descriptions of all the deaths and suffering they have seen. And if the situation is dire, they are even more blunt. Alex Inkhamheng, a nurse in Amarillo, Texas, told the few COVID-19 patients he treated who wanted to leave the ICU that they would not survive even a few steps without oxygen. “Sometimes you have to be brutally honest,” he said, as some patients “will die for what they believe”.

Earlier this month, Ashley Bartholomew decided to be brutally honest with a COVID-19 patient in intensive care who criticized the “fake news” about freezer truck morgues and played down the virus. As it was the nurse’s last shift at an El Paso hospital, she let down her professional guard. In tears, she told the man of about 50 that he was the only patient she treated that day who could speak, and that she had never seen so many deaths in 10 years. at work.

Her attitude began to change, she later wrote in a viral tweet, especially when she got him out of the ICU after patients on ventilators. But his response was an act of desperation, a last ditch attempt to convince someone of their own illness, rather than a lasting or necessarily moral path (usually, “we don’t tell our patients that another patient has just died. She tweeted). And although Bartholomew had already given her hospital notice – her family moved to another city for her husband’s job and she needed a break from nursing – the incident reinforced her choice and made her desperate.

She’s not the only one ready to quit. Nursing already had high turnover rates before the pandemic, but now healthcare workers say their mental health has dropped to an all-time low. Some have even dealt with colleagues who downplay the severity of the disease: Weeks before the election, Inkhamheng says a fellow nurse told him COVID-19 was not a problem – “just like the flu” – and that hospitals inflated death rates for profit; Perez is now in quarantine because one of his colleagues did not wear a mask on his nose and subsequently tested positive for the virus. And the assault they face isn’t limited to hospitals: Nurses say it’s a boost to see people in their community packing their bags in bars and restaurants. They were threatened with death for speaking, and a nurse told me that her colleague had been asked to leave a store because her scrubs made customers “uncomfortable”; another said she was called a “slut” after asking a woman to put on a mask at a Home Depot.

Edmonds is struggling with depression and says the past few months have been the most difficult of his career. With the second wave crashing hard on her hospital, she has been forced to juggle too many patients and worries that if someone dies under her watch, she may have to face a family who don’t even believe the COVID-19 is real. She no longer raises her hand for overtime; she is too overwhelmed and worried about situations in which she might find herself.

For the first time in 22 years at work, Carla, the nurse from North Carolina, is considering quitting smoking. She regularly calls her family to cry on the phone: “I just don’t know if I want to do this anymore,” she says. “Which is really frustrating for me, because I love my job.”

Many of the nurses I have spoken with are predicting a wave of quits. (In Pennsylvania, 700 nurses recently went on strike, citing staff shortages, PTSD and burnout.) It would put enormous pressure on a system that is already on the brink and means patients could be treated by health workers who are not. is not necessarily trained to handle COVID-19. But Bartholomew says the blame should fall on political leaders and media outlets like Fox News spreading the kind of disinformation that has turned hospitals into battlegrounds for partisan warfare.

“The disinformation pandemic, in addition to the COVID pandemic, is too heavy for nurses to fight,” she said. “It’s like a slap in the face calling us heroes in the spring and not trusting us in the fall.”