With the coronavirus raging unchecked and hospitals overflowing in many parts of the U.S., medical workers are beseeching governors, mayors and city councils to impose mask mandates and other stricter measures, often to no avail — and are growing impatient with official inaction.
In South Dakota, which has the highest rate of Covid-19 hospitalizations in the country but no statewide mask mandate, one doctor after another spoke out at a City Council meeting in Sioux Falls on Tuesday, calling for the city to impose its own.
“In South Dakota, we are light-years behind in our response, and it shows,” said Dr. Shannon Emry, a pediatrician. She said doctors and hospital leaders have been pleading for action for weeks. “Have we been too polite in asking for help? Are we not being loud enough? When will people start to believe us, and help out?”
After five hours of public comment at the meeting, Mayor Paul TenHaken cast a tie-breaking vote to reject a proposed mask ordinance.
When doctors in Nebraska took to Twitter last week to call for stricter measures from Gov. Pete Ricketts, the governor’s spokesman dismissed the calls as politically motivated, drawing further criticism from medical workers. Governor Ricketts, who went into quarantine earlier this week after social contact with someone who tested positive, tightened some restrictions in mid-October but has resisted taking further steps.
In North Dakota, where Covid-swamped hospitals are critically short of staff, Gov. Doug Burgum angered the state nurses’ union by announcing on Monday that the state would address the problem by having medical workers who test positive stay on the job to treat coronavirus patients as long as the workers show no symptoms.
In a statement on Wednesday, the North Dakota Nurses Association said the state should be taking actions like imposing a mask mandate to help reduce the burden, and then calling upon infected medical workers only as a last resort.
“N.D.N.A. recommends that all other public health measures to reduce the demand on the health care system and address staffing shortages are deployed before implementing this particular strategy,” the union wrote in a statement.
— Lucy Tompkins The New York Times