Sygeplejersker og sundhedspersonale er pandemiens helte – nogle betaler med døden for deres heltedåd

Mere end 180.000 sundhedspersonale har betalt med deres liv under covid-19-pandemien

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Nurses and health professionals are the pandemic´s heroes – some pay for their heroic deeds with their lives

More than 180,000 healthcare professionals have paid with their lives during the covid-19 pandemic

If you are a nurse, SOSU assistant or healthcare professional who has worked with corona patients, I would like to thank you.

Healthcare professionals around the world have brought sacrifices, both mentally, physically and in the form of thousands of lost human lives in the healthcare sector.

The WHO estimates that up to 180,000 nurses, doctors, nurses, porters and health professionals in general may have died of covid-19 in the period January 2020 to May 2021. The WHO has stated that the figure may in fact be estimated 60% too low.

After nearly two years with this disease monster, nurses and health care professionals are at the brink of exhaustion. They are burnt out, stressed, suffer from anxiety and are tired to the core of their bones.

Here in the United States, many nurses are looking for work in other sectors of the healthcare industry to get away from the hospitals. This means that those who are left behind have to run twice as fast or compromise on the quality of their work because they simply cannot do everything.

I have followed the development from the sidelines. My friend works as a nurse at a hospital here in Seattle. She is a wound care nurse, so she comes into close contact with the discharges of vulnerable citizens. It is a job that requires hygiene standards to be followed closely. The job is made no less dangerous by the fact that many of those she treats are homeless, drug addicts and mentally vulnerable. They are often aggressive and unpredictable in their behavior.

For the first many months of the pandemic, she had to reuse her surgical mask for up to two weeks and was of course not vaccinated. She saw several nursing colleagues leave their jobs, after which she had to step in and cover their work. At the hospital, there is a constant shortage of nurses and the nursing positions in her ward have still not been filled. In several hospitals in my state, many surgeries are postponed indefinitely because the resources are spent on Covid patients.

Denmark has done formidably well, partly because the population, and thus also the health personnel, have had access to vaccines. Unfortunately, this is not the case everywhere in the world. In Africa, only one in ten in the healthcare industry is vaccinated.

Regardless of whether it is politically motivated when Denmark sends vaccines to a specific country in Africa, it helps the healthcare staff and the country’s population when the nurses are healthy enough to be able to take care of their patients.

In eight days, the G20 countries will meet. Between now and then, It is the goal to have 500 million doses produced and that at least 40 percent of the world´s population is vaccinated. Right now, it seems that 82 nations are not reaching that goal, mainly due to lack of access to vaccines.

Countries with access to and an abundance of vaccines have promised to provide 1.2 billion vaccines to those countries that are in short supply. But they have not yet lived up to their commitment. Only a total of 150 million have been reached. Meanwhile, the healthcare workers in these countries pay the highest price with their lives when they try to save their patients.

Once the vaccines reach the countries that still need to receive them, it is vital that healthcare professionals are the first to receive the jab that enables them to survive and save others.

If the health care system is on the verge of collapsing, we have no welfare, then a country’s system is collapsing. It’s that simple, and it does not matter what form of government you have. This applies to the welfare state of Denmark, and it applies to countries that do not have the same welfare structure as the Scandinavian countries.

The corona pandemic has cost far too many lives. Today, I bow my head in respect for nurses, ambulance drivers, porters and everyone else in the healthcare sector to respect all the lost heroes who paid the ultimate price with their lives.

(Partly Google Translate)