There Is No Outside by Verso Books

Author:Verso Books [Books, n+1 and Verso]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

10

There Is No Outside

Health workers can respond to this crisis by taking up working-class struggles as our own

Karim Sariahmed

April 8, 2020

I work at a New York safety-net health system that serves poor folks who are mostly Black and brown. The primary-care clinic where I am a resident closed two weeks ago: like most major hospital systems throughout the US, the hospital has put a stop to all non-acute care, aside from telemedicine. Most of the primary-care doctors and other subspecialists who’d normally see patients for routine checkups have been drafted onto the frontlines, into the emergency rooms and hospital corridors of what professionals call “the inpatient setting.”

Until recently I was at home as a back-up, waiting to fill in when other residents got too sick to work. While I waited, numerous friends checked in on me—some of them even sent me masks in the mail. A number of those masks, like the ones solicited by my brother and gathered from his friends, are real N95 respirators. They’ll do some good for me and my fellow emergency room workers as our system continues to fail us and our patients. My sister made cloth masks, and those I hope never to need.

There is little certainty about how things will look inside the emergency room by mid-April, when mortality is projected to peak—much less in a month’s time. My hospital recently started giving out new N95s every day, but by no means is that the norm: nurses at Harlem Hospital recently protested a policy requiring them to use a single mask for five twelve-hour shifts. Without sweeping federal, state, and local protections, any level of sustained protection is tenuous and subject to the whims of administrators and a corrupt and broken supply chain. Never mind that there is simply much we don’t know, like how the seasonal variation seen in other coronaviruses will play out in this case. This moment of crisis is also a moment of extreme uncertainty.

The stereotype about those of us in internal medicine is that we are overly scrupulous. It’s not unfounded. The time to think about a single patient and reflect on their condition always feels like a luxury for me, but it’s an important luxury all the same. Which is to say that the emergency room is not a place where I’m very comfortable. I’d been assigned to be in the emergency department (the ED) at this time since the beginning of the year and showed up last Monday at 7 AM after taking twenty-four hours to recover from weekend night coverage at a different hospital in the same system. The ER is chaotic on a normal day. The last time I entered, a few months ago, it was near capacity, with all of the “chair beds” full of the less urgently sick people, many of them chatting on the phone while waiting to be seen. Those kinds of patients are now being seen in a tent outside. The folks in the actual ER don’t all need supplemental oxygen, but all of them look miserable.

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