Medical workers around the world are facing pressure to keep fighting the coronavirus pandemic despite there being a shortage in protective medical gear. Tanzia Haq reports.
On Wednesday, healthcare professionals in the United States stood six feet apart and protested better protection for their colleagues who are dying from COVID-19 exposure, demanding better preparedness, training, staffing and quarantine housing for hospital workers during the pandemic in order to avoid spreading infection to their families.
Similar stories have been reported across the globe, for instance in late March nurses in Papua New Guinea held protests demanding better personal protective equipment (PPE) as the island nation started recording incoming cases of coronavirus.
In April in the southwestern city of Quetta in Pakistan, roughly fifty doctors were reportedly arrested for protesting against lack of protective measures for healthcare workers’ safety. The protest was organized by Pakistan’s Young Doctors’ Association.
Doctors in Bangladesh have also reported lack of protective gear and have reported cases of doctors having to go into quarantine under suspicion of contracting infection. Although authorities report that certain departments like the emergency and pediatric wards received more protective gear, many hospitals are still severely lacking.
Doctors around the world fear that the lack of effective protective equpitment is actively harming our chances of beating the virus.
Without proper recognition of the gaps in healthcare services in each country, we will continue to remain unprepared to deal with growing numbers of infections.
As Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO, puts it, “”When healthworkers are at risk, we’re all at risk.”
