More U.S. hospitals are requiring masks and limiting visitors as health officials face an expected but still nasty post-holiday spike in flu, COVID-19 and other illnesses.
While many experts say this season likely won’t prove to be as deadly as some other recent winters, it still could mean hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and many thousands of deaths across the country.
New York City last week instituted a mask mandate for the city’s 11 public hospitals. Similar measures were ordered last week at some hospitals in Los Angeles and Massachusetts. Some hospitals reinstated masking rules for employees months ago, in anticipation of a seasonal rush of sick people.
Surgical tech here - I’ve been working in a hospital for this whole crazy ride. N95s work via seal and filter - they absolutely make it harder to breathe, by design. If yours isn’t, you probably don’t have a good seal. BUT the resistance it adds to in-/exhaling is an annoyance at worse: the folks gasping and complaining that they “can’t breathe” are dramatic little shits.
They do chew your face up a bit after even a week or so of wearing it from start to finish of every shift. Little sore, little raw - again, an annoyance, not a show-stopper.
Hospital staff are just as whiney and petty as any other slice of the population though, so when you ask them to tolerate an annoyance like that, they bitch and refuse to comply until the policy is either changed or blatantly not enforced. And we can’t just fire all the idiots, cuz we’re already short staffed EVERYWHERE, and even though Kyle in the Ortho clinic is spreading misinformation as fast as he is pathogens, he can run an ORIF fucking quick, and we’re booked out till March, so we’re stuck with him.
The biggest problem is that we politicized a fucking virus, and apparently our education and expertise go out the window the second some Nazi on Fox says he knows better than the entirety of the medical field.
Anyway, you and the previous poster are both mostly right, just remember that harder to breathe ≠ can’t breathe; and don’t underestimate the amount of damage a healthcare worker will do under the influence of Fox.
A slightly higher pollen count in the air can make it “harder to breathe”. Hell, someone who doesn’t understand how to wear cologne/perfume makes it “harder to breathe”. Entertaining that even slightly just emboldens the idiots.
But yeah. Masking every day from 9 to 5 (or 4 to 23…) sucks. I would kind of expect the associated callouses to be developed by this point, but I do “get it” at the crazier hospitals/floors. But the waiting rooms and lab techs tend to have significantly more “down time” while also having a LOT more exposure to people who are actively sick. Which, ignoring covid for the moment… is still shitty.