April 7 marks the World Health Organization’s World Health Day. Its motto, this year, seems to be “nurses and midwives help us live in a happier, healthier world — take a minute to say thank you”.
I don’t know about you, but awareness dates just like this one strike me as a bit of fluff and fuzz that might bring small glimpses of enlightenment to some people’s minds, that they may share with their friends on social media, and that they then promptly forget about.
This World Health Day, the World Health Organization calls on us to celebrate the work of nurses and midwives around the globe and “remind world leaders of the critical role they play in keeping the world healthy”. The WHO rightfully points out that “nurses and other health workers are at the forefront of COVID-19 response”; that, “without nurses, there would be no response”.
But this isn’t a feel-good story.
Global governments, advised by the WHO, reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic too slowly and too weakly. A notable exception is Taiwan, which the World Health Organization doesn’t even recognize as a country and which was excluded from important studies during the SARS outbreak. They were way ahead of the curve with contact tracing, smart quarantines, and fever screening even back then in 2003, and have once again risen to the challenge in political isolation. Taiwan’s COVID-19 statistics speak for themselves.
Other countries have lagged behind. Now, people are getting sick in record numbers, and dying in record numbers. That’s the kind of frontline our healthcare workers find themselves on.
This directly affects citizens who aren’t healthcare workers, too. NHS staff were prohibited from performing CPR on suspected COVID-19 patients suffering through cardiac arrest to prevent aerosol contamination of the medical staff, as have some other European countries in their ICUs. When healthcare workers are vulnerable, we all are.
When our healthcare systems are forced to the brink or beyond, and our doctors, nurses, midwives, cleaning staff, and everyone else working hard to protect public health is left unprotected, we’re very much shooting ourselves in the proverbial foot. Who will care for the rest of us when they’re unable to? Inadequately protected, fighting for their fellow citizens, we all have to remember that healthcare workers’ risk of infection only grows alongside the rate of cases in the general population.
WHO, masks, recommendations, and improvisations
While the World Health Organization is a giant without actual decision-making powers, there is no doubt that it exerts an impressive influence on almost every healthcare system worldwide; their recommendations are respected and their campaigns followed.
It is true that global crises primarily require national governments to act fast and act wisely, but the WHO plays a key role in providing support, recommendations, and diverse information sources.
Since the outbreak started in China — which initially attempted to deliberately suppress the spread of information about the virus, until the outbreak could no longer be contained — the multitude of misinformation significantly delayed the response, allowing COVID-19 to spread like wildfire.
The WHO tried to stay objective, tried to get the most accurate info from China, but some crucially important information was omitted. Some of it remains blurry — like the lack of reliable transmission stats and statements that COVID-19 is not airborne.
With new and more transparently-shared lessons learned in Europe, mainly Italy and Spain, new protection measures for health workers and population are emerging.
Many regions and countries have started strongly recommending the use of face masks — and the American CDC has gone as far as to recommend cloth masks in the absence of surgical-grade masks. The prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a paper that practically begged policy makers to rethink their stance on mass masking, saying: “Absence of evidence of effectiveness should not be equated to evidence of ineffectiveness, especially when facing a novel situation with limited alternative options”.
Even so, the World Health Organization hasn’t updated its recommendation, and continues to advise the public that “If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection.” Why?
We need to take responsibility, to save our healthcare systems and ourselves
It means we don’t all get sick at the same time, so we can either stop our healthcare systems from becoming completely overwhelmed, or help them get off the thin ledge they’ve already found themselves on.
Previous predictions demonstrated the kind of scenario that would be seen during a pandemic with 90 percent certainty. One of the most accurate was proposed to the German parliament (Bundestag) by German science community Risk analysis in 2012. It foresaw the current scenario with almost creepy accuracy.
The German prediction was even more apocalyptic, forecasting three waves of outbreak during a period of three years, infecting more than 80 percent of the population and killing almost 10 percent. They also clearly predict immense problems with healthcare systems, like nation-wide medical care collapse, limits on resource capacities, and a lack of hospital beds. They forecast grim numbers for the entire health sector, with a huge number of infected health professionals as a result of an increased risk of contagion and physiological stress, as well as increased need for medicines, medical gear, personal protective equipment, and disinfectants.
Taking a minute to thank healthcare workers most certainly isn’t enough this World Health Day — whether online, in a nice statement produced by the World Health Organization, or even by applauding them from your balconies.
We count on our frontline healthcare workers, the foot soldiers in this grand battle. They count on us, too. Now more than ever, we need to do every last thing in our power to support them. They are the true heroes, the ones who’ll get humanity to the other side of this war, and they deserve nothing less than our total support.
An update
Months have passed since we initially published this article. At the time of this update (August 10, 2020), 728,013 people have lost their lives to COVID-19. A total of 19,718,030 cases were confirmed across the globe — and by now, we are all familiar with the fact that not everyone with symptoms has access to testing, so this is likely the mere tip of a giant iceberg.
We are all fed up with COVID-19. We don't want to read about it any longer, we don't want to bother with social distancing any longer, and many countries eased restrictions as cases seemed to drop and economic concerns took over. Only time will tell if we're now standing at the entrance to an apocalyptic abyss, or those of us who survive will look back on this crisis and breathe a sigh of relief that it's all over and we recovered the way of life that was normal in 2019.
We can influence that, however. Those same healthcare workers so many of us clapped for appear to be largely forgotten in the public mind by now, but they're soldiering on — maybe not as tirelessly as ever, but nonetheless. They should still be in our minds, but as school years are starting, so should another group of public servants; our teachers.
As parents worry about the risk their children may be exposed to if they return to brick and mortar school, or even rant about the psychological harm social distancing policies may cause, teachers have less choice. They have jobs to do, and will show up to teach if they are told to do so.
Teachers, too, need more than a minute in our thoughts or a "thank you" — they deserve and require safe working conditions.
Sources & Links
- Photos courtesy of SteadyHealth.