Nursing in the Time of Pandemics

Having come of age and been a nursing student during the early days of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, I have been feeling many moments of deja vu over the past month with the world-wide spread of the novel coronavirus and the accompanying COVID-19 illnesses. It is, of course, more than a distant global health issue now since I live, work, and teach nursing in Seattle-King County–site of the first death of a patient with COVID-19 and where experts now estimate at least 1,500 people are already infected. The two high-risk groups for severe complications and deaths from COVID-19 are healthcare providers and older people who have underlying chronic illnesses. I fall into one and a half of those categories, so I am concerned on a personal level.

But I am concerned on a larger level because I teach hundreds of nursing students and feel an urgent responsibility to help prepare and equip them to deal with this public health emergency. And not just the practical training and adequate access to the necessary medical supplies–on the use of personal protective equipment like face masks and goggles. But also the emotional and ethical preparation and support for processing a rapidly evolving, complicated pandemic. Acknowledgement that fear and anxiety are part of this but that we have a personal and professional duty to care for people despite that fear and without bias. I like the public health messaging that has gone out from our Public Health-Seattle & King County people: “Viruses Don’t Discriminate and Neither Should We.” Yet it goes beyond that, to an acknowledgement of weaknesses of our healthcare and public health system and resolve to do better, to learn from our mistakes–including from our mistakes in how we handled the HIV/AIDS pandemic. We cannot allow shallow, partisan politics, malicious misinformation, undermining of evidence-based public health interventions, and bigotry to fuel the spread of this virus.