Amid a string of COVID-19 deaths of employees at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn, nurses are demanding more protective equipment for themselves and their colleagues.
“They have to do better, in order to save lives,” said Ada Brown, a certified nurse’s assistant who has worked at the 300-bed hospital in East Flatbush for the last five years. “The nurses are dying out. The CNAs, dying out. Everybody’s dying out.”
The nurses have been collecting the names of their dead co-workers by word of mouth. There’s been at least five deaths so far, they say—a young surgeon, a nurse’s assistant, a clerk, a security guard, someone who worked in the supply room. Several more workers are hospitalized.
Kingsbrook is a private hospital, serving the area’s low-income community, many of whom are black and of Carribean descent. The hospital’s management did not return repeated requests for comment.
There are no official statistics on how many healthcare workers have gotten sick or died from COVID-19 across the region. While some city agencies have released numbers for their employees, the city’s hospital system has not. The state health department, which oversees private hospitals like Kingsbrook, said it’s not tracking deaths by occupation.
“There’s announcements from the schools system about education workers who died, there’s announcements from the transit authority about transit workers who have died,” said Kingsbrook nurse Julie Keefe, who has worked there on and off since 2012. “But about healthcare workers, there’s a bit of feeling that no one’s really tracking the deaths.”
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Several other private hospitals didn’t return requests right away on how many employees had passed away from COVID-19. A spokesman for Northwell Health, which runs 23 hospitals across the region, did respond, saying five of their employees have died from the virus in their whole system, the same number workers are reporting at this one Brooklyn location.
The New York State Nurses Association has reported a handful of their members who’ve passed away in recent weeks, and they’re surveying members, but so far do not have an overall count of how many healthcare workers and hospital employees have died, officials said.
Nurses outside Kingsbrook on Wednesday morning said a shortage of protective gear at their hospital is in part to blame for the deaths there. They’re given a disposable face shield and they’re told to use it for a month, nurses said. They get one gown a day even if it rips, in which case some have been forced to use trash bags to cover the hole. One woman was wearing a rain slicker because she couldn’t find a gown.
“The politicians keep on trying to say we’re okay,” Keefe said. “We’re speaking for everyone to say, ‘It’s not better, it’s still not okay.’”
Access to personal protective gear for healthcare workers is an ongoing nationwide issue. Even prestigious institutions like Mount Sinai have faced shortages of protective gear, as hospitals all over the country and the globe have gobbled up supplies.
But the nurses union pointed out that unlike large hospital chains with purchasing departments and high powered contacts, like New York Presybterian, where a trustee reportedly chartered a plane to China to find face masks, smaller community hospitals may only have one person to handle all purchasing. Kingsbrook became part of the One Brooklyn Health system in 2017, as part of an effort to restructure and revive several financially struggling hospitals in the borough.
Meanwhile, the New York State Nurses Union has been flagging hospitals across the city with equipment shortages when they hear of them, with pop up rallies at Wyckoff Hospital, Lincoln Hospital and Jacobi in recent days.
“I believe that the protective gear is going to be in sufficient supply,” said Kenneth Raske, the President and CEO, Greater New York Hospital Association, who is helping coordinate New York’s response to the outbreak.
He pointed to a change in policy over the weekend that allows healthcare workers to request N95 masks. “If a physician or nurse or respiratory therapist or any caregiver on the frontline who's providing care to Covid-positive patients ... if they want a new N95, they will get it.”
But the nurses gathered outside Kingsbrook are worried about more than just N95 masks. The chanting crowd quieted as Arlene Meertens, 52, a patient care technician, spoke up. Her voice quivered with fear and anger, as she described the terror in her children’s eyes every time she leaves for work, and how they check on her during the night to make sure she’s still breathing.
“If we are continuously working without the proper gear that we need, we will all die. So who will take care of the patients? They need us,” Meertens said. “Protect us. That’s all we are asking. Give us what we need so we can survive.”
With reporting from Fred Mogul.
