It gets really, really hot inside the protective gear Sean White has to wear most of the time. His skin is sore from the tight-fitting face mask and two pairs of gloves worn almost non-stop for 12 hours at a time.
White is a critical care nurse at a major teaching hospital in London and -- like nurses in almost every country around the world -- he couldn't be any more frontline in the battle against coronavirus. His hospital is currently treating several hundred Covid-19 patients in the city at the epicenter of the UK outbreak, which has so far claimed more than 7,000 lives.
When coronavirus patients end up in hospital, it's nurses who care for them most of the time and who are responsible for making sure they receive the right treatment.
"There is still this view that nurses, you know, are washing patients, feeding them and just being these compassionate, caring souls... which is exactly what nurses are, but there is this other layer of things that nurses do now," said Laura Duffell, a matron nurse at the King's College Hospital in London.
White spends his working days taking care of people who are fighting for their lives. Patients are often on ventilators, suffering from multiple organ failure, sedated, with number of tubes attached to them. It's a high-pressure job, but he knows what he is doing -- he has been doing it for years.
But in this crisis, White says even he is at his limits.
"We're having to prioritize things, not do some of the other things that we normally do, we make changes to our normal practice," he said.
White checks patients' oxygen levels, adjusts ventilators, runs blood tests, cleans wounds, replaces dressings, monitors tubes and takes care of sick people's mouths and eyes. Once every four hours, he moves them to prevent bed sores. He also reassures them when they wake up in a scary and unfamiliar environment.
At normal times, each nurse looks after one patient at a time. But these are not normal times. White has been deployed to other intensive care units (ICUs) and is now regularly juggling two patients. The plan is to go up to four if necessary, he says.
"These are demanding patients," said Rosana Josep Zaragoza, a nurse working at Guy's Hospital in London, of ICU coronavirus cases. "They might have eight infusions attached to their bed and you have to make sure they are not running out, that they are working properly, and you are dealing with a breathing machine and sometimes a kidney machine," she added.
At the same time, the nurses are very aware of the risk they themselves are facing. White said that he and his colleagues are wondering "when, rather than if" they catch the virus. "We're hoping that it will be like a cold, but we keep hearing all the time of people who don't necessarily have health problems who have died," he said.
edition.cnn.com/2020/04/09/europe/nurses-fighting-coronavirus-pay-gbr-intl/index.html
