Nurses and other medical professionals at Bellevue hospital are reporting many instances of the public mistreating or discriminating against them out of fear of being contaminated by the Ebola virus.
After Dr. Craig Spencer was taken to Bellevue and confirmed to be first NYC case of Ebola, many people have had irrational fears of infection and it’s taking a toll on the hospital’s staff. One woman whom the New York Times spoke with said that, upon learning about her new job at Bellevue, her hairdresser of six years asked her to find someone else to do her hair. Another worker said he lost a teaching position, and one nurse’s child hasn’t been allowed to attend daycare.
More than a dozen employees have officially reported cases of being discriminated against, and what’s worse is that many people working in the isolation unit say they’re treated differently by Bellevue staff. Some isolation nurses have decided to forego leaving at all, asking for sleeping arrangements so as not to put anyone at risk.
Ebola has killed about 5,000 people in West Africa this year and is fatal in about half the cases, but in America, there’ve only been a handful of cases and patients are far more likely to survive. Governor Andrew Cuomo says that’s just because we have much better medical facilities here:
“West Africa doesn’t have the sophistication of the system that we have, and if they did, the problem wouldn’t have gotten to this level even in West Africa.”
(Photo: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)
