by Jacqueline LeKachman
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Writing this essay about the coronavirus that has so drastically impacted my life and the world was empowering as it proved to me that, although the virus is unpredictable, I have the power to choose how I respond to it. Moreover, creating this essay helped me progress from annoyance while watching a press conference where Trump discussed PPE to a thorough investigation of the heroism rhetoric underlying discourse about health workers.
Because the virus’ impact on health workers is a continuously evolving story, I was constantly researching and integrating new sources into my piece from mid-March 2020 until the essay was due in May. This experience helped me adopt a fluid revision process that required weaving diverse sources together as events evolved. For instance, between my first draft created in mid-April and my final draft, I included four new sources in my essay and removed sources that had become outdated. The most drastic change I made from my first to final draft, though, was integrating dulce et decorum est into my essay. I decided to make this change after I connected the treatment of war soldiers to the treatment of health workers during this pandemic. Realizing that the rhetoric justifying health workers’ struggles is an ancient one that has justified millions of soldiers’ deaths, and recognizing an opportunity to comment on how history is repeating itself with this harmful idea of patriotism, I made rejecting dulce et decorum est a central part of the paradigm shift I call for at the end of my essay.
—Jacqueline LeKachman
On March 29, 2020, President Trump made yet another staggering statement. According to The Guardian’s coverage of a White House press conference, when discussing how the federal government was handling state officials’ pleas for personal protective equipment (PPE) during the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump asked, “Where are the masks going, are they going out the back door?” (“Trump implies” 00:00:24-00:00:26) ). He continued, “I want the people in New York to check Governor Cuomo, Mayor de Blasio, that when a hospital that’s getting 10,000 masks goes to 300,000 masks during the same period . . . there’s something going on” (“Trump implies” 00:00:33-00:00:48). The insinuation that hospitals in America’s coronavirus epicenter, New York City, are asking for more masks because health workers are stealing PPE previously delivered to them was met with confusion and intensified concerns about health workers’ protection during the COVID-19 crisis. Common Dreams staff writer Eoin Higgins explains that even before Trump made this comment and the U.S. began leading the world in COVID-19 cases, hospitals nationwide reported having to ration necessary materials like gowns and N95 respirators. Health workers also felt the government lacked a unified plan to combat the virus (Higgins). After Trump’s insinuation that health workers are mishandling PPE, backlash increased; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio responded, “That’s just insensitive and it’s unhelpful” (qtd. in Higgins).
Trump’s response to protecting health workers on the frontlines has unleashed a national debate over whether our healthcare heroes are sufficiently protected from the virus. Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, like Mayor de Blasio, has argued they are not, saying, “When you compare our federal shipments to our burn rate, the product that we’ve received from the federal government stockpile will last only a handful of days” (“Trump Defends” 00:01:02-00:01:11). The argument here is that PPE needs are beyond states’ capacities, and that even the supplies the federal government does provide, many of which are disposable, are used quickly. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer similarly stated on April 6 that Michigan has “less than three days ’til face shields run out and less than six days until surgical gowns run out” (“Trump Defends” 00:00:46-00:00:53). According to Higgins’s Common Dreams article, others, like medical historian Deborah Levine, argue that to combat this issue, the government could have produced needed supplies through the Defense Production Act, which lets the president require businesses to produce materials necessary for national defense (Higgins). Regardless of how the term “national defense” is interpreted, there is unified agreement that the PPE shortage indeed exists and poses a threat to health workers.
Amidst these criticisms, Trump has defended the government’s method of providing PPE, highlighting how medical materials are sent directly to hospitals instead of to the government’s emergency stockpile. Trump also stated in early April that the National Guard is moving materials to hospitals, and the White House reported providing hospitals with “11.6m [million] N95 respirators, 26m surgical masks, 5.2m face shields, 4.3m surgical gowns, 22m gloves, and 8,100 ventilators” through FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Smith). However, New York Governor Cuomo has criticized FEMA for producing a “bidding war” between states over supplies and driving up prices, since FEMA buys from the same supply chain states are using (Smith, Feiner). The result of these unethical price increases is that health workers are forced to reuse masks or resort to using other materials, sometimes even garbage bags, for protection (Breen). As Dr. Craig Spencer of Columbia Medical Center explains to NBC News, some workers are “given one N95 respirator per week. They are not meant to be reused; we’re trying to find ways to reuse them because the supply chain is short. People are . . . baking them to try to kill the virus; they’re subjecting them to UV light” (“‘COVID’” 00:01:25-00:01:39). Unfortunately, even with these methods, many health care workers are getting infected with COVID-19: as of April 7, CBS reported that 1,500 workers showed symptoms in Michigan’s largest hospital system, which endangers both patients and colleagues (“Health care workers”).
Underlying the PPE debate between state and federal officials is the moral issue of how limited medical supplies force health workers to make impossible decisions, such as going to work despite a lack of protection. On the frontlines of the virus response, Michigan pulmonologist Rana Awdish told The Atlantic, “Everyone’s talked about their contingency plans if they did get sick. We’ve talked about who gets our pets, which is somewhat of an easier discussion than who gets your children” (“Doctors” 00:03:36-00:03:51). The virus’s emotional toll on health workers who grapple with endangering their families due to virus exposure is massive. After health workers decide to go to work, limited medical equipment forces them to make even more decisions, often with dire consequences. Emergency nurse John Pearson explains he could be “faced with this decision of, we’ve got two patients who need to go on a ventilator, or they’ll die. We have one ventilator. Which one’s going on the ventilator?” (“Doctors” 00:04:07-00:04:15). Furthering this point, emergency physician Salim Rezaie declared, “I definitely did not go into the practice of medicine to play God” (“Doctors” 00:04:39-00:04:43).
Unlike the virus, these moral conflicts are not novel: during the 1918 flu and 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemics, nurses felt similarly torn between keeping others safe, keeping themselves safe, and making life-altering decisions for strangers. Pamela Cipriano, president of the American Nurses Association, explains that during the 2003 SARS outbreak, twenty percent of cases globally affected health workers (305). During these crises, we must consider how to honor health workers appropriately, but applying the words heroic and patriotic to health workers’ struggles is not always as straightforward as it might seem. As early as March, a CBS News video described health workers as “heroes of [the] coronavirus” and thanked them for their service, equating the pandemic to World War I (“A Salute”). A more recent Guardian article describes health workers as “national heroes” (Wright). Other news outlets carry similar sentiments. In response to this portrayal in the media, other essential workers who are not health care professionals, like Amazon employees, have raised concerns about dangerous working conditions that make it clear that not all essential workers are revered as patriotic heroes (Weise and Conger). Precisely this emphasis on health workers as heroes prevents us from reckoning with the moral issues surrounding health workers’ forced sacrifices and taking any tangible action as a result.
One dangerous way a health worker’s “hero” label causes us to overlook unfair, amoral working conditions is that it erases the human behind that label, burying the understanding that these people are in fact mortal and need help to do their jobs. In an article about American heroism, Atlantic writer Leah Carroll highlights how the designation can actually dehumanize people, explaining, “In our imaginations, heroes live forever in the singular moment of glory: the fall on the grenade, . . . the seemingly effortless glide of the airplane onto the Hudson River.” In other words, we crystallize heroes in our minds as perpetually brave, strong, and alive in their heroic moment; we see pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger miraculously execute an emergency landing on the Hudson and selflessly check the flight for passengers as the cabin fills with freezing water (“2009”). However, though no one died on the Hudson that day, Carroll quickly reminds us that “heroes do die.” To treat them as if they live forever in the bask of their heroism is to deprive them of a part of their humanity and to hold them to “unrealistic and dangerous expectations, designed to fill the vacuum of a 24-hour news cycle hungry for the moment of glory” (Carroll). By unreasonably valuing only their moment of heroism, we forget that these heroes are people who need support from others in order to care for themselves and do their jobs. When asked if his heroic feat was a miracle, Captain Sully told ABC News, “No, it was hard work on the part of many people and the entire industry over many decades” (“Capt. Sully” 00:06:11-00:06:16). He highlights how his heroism resulted from preparation, teamwork, and training—tools that he developed with support from those who recognized these tools as integral to his survival. Without this support network, we would be talking about the tragedy on the Hudson instead of the miracle, just as we now discuss the tragedies in the hospitals.
Unfortunately, in the case of the current tragedy, designating health workers as invincible heroes erases their needs. As a result, unlike Captain Sully, they are not receiving the tools they need, in this case, PPE, COVID-19 training, mental health services, and more. The term “hero” masks the fact that health workers lack these vital tools with deadly consequences. For example, New York E.R. physician Dr. Lorna Breen tragically died by suicide after experiencing the horrific, “grueling work” of treating virus patients and contracting the virus herself (“New York Doctor” 00:00:45-00:00:46). In a New York Times article about this tragic loss, her father commented that she “tried to do her job, and it killed her,” emphasizing how she was a victim not of the virus but of the expectation that as a hero on the frontlines, she could perpetually withstand watching patients and colleagues die (qtd. in Watkins). Sadly, her story is not an isolated experience. Dr. Jeff Le of Maimonides Medical Center explained to NBC News, “I wish I had known the type of emotional havoc this would have caused on my life, . . . the lives of my colleagues” (“New York Doctor” 00:00:59-00:01:09). In other words, he wishes he had been prepared and supported instead of expected to somehow emerge from the pandemic unscathed—a “hero.” Ominously, the very language that obscured Dr. Breen’s needs and continues to fail to meet Dr. Le’s has now saturated almost all discourse about health care professionals. The omnipresence of words like “hero” and “bravery” reveals that even as doctors are dying, we continue to uncritically accept triumphant narratives that mask the fact that tragic stories like Dr. Breen’s could have been avoided with the appropriate mental health support.