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Bronx hospital issues Yankee rain ponchos to its staff due to shortages

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
One Hospital’s Last Resort to Protect Doctors: Yankee Rain Ponchos

When a doctor at one of New York City’s top hospitals arrived for work on Tuesday night, she found the following items in the bag of protective equipment that she received: a mask, an eye shield — and, in place of the usual medical gown, a plastic white-and-navy New York Yankees poncho, the kind available for purchase on rainy game days.

Outraged, the doctor, an obstetrician-gynecologist resident at the hospital, part of Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, took a picture of the poncho and posted it on Twitter. “I’m a physician at a hospital in NYC and THIS IS THE ‘PPE’ I WAS JUST HANDED for my shift,” she wrote, using the acronym for “personal protective equipment.”

The post was retweeted tens of thousands of times, emerging as a viral illustration of the equipment shortages that have plagued hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.

From Seattle to Miami, but especially in New York City, the epicenter of the coronavirus crisis in the United States, workers have said they do not have enough gear to protect themselves from the virus as they treat patients. Doctors and nurses have had to reuse equipment or use trash bags and scarves for protection.

It sounded like a good idea. The Yankees donated thousands of rain ponchos to substitute in hospitals due to a severe shortage of personal protection equipment (PPE). However, the article later pointed out that rain ponchos are poor substitutes for PPE. The hospital stated that the ponchos were merely a gift for the weary staffers, intended only for their own personal use.

In a statement, Montefiore Medical Center said the ponchos were not intended as protective gear but instead were a gift to weary staffers.

“We received a very generous donation of 2,500 ponchos from our Bronx neighbors and friends The New York Yankees,” said the statement, issued on Wednesday evening. “We distributed them, first come first served, to the first 2,500 of our staff who walked in the door last night and this morning. This was a gift intended for their personal use.”

The Yankees also declined to comment. But a team executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, said someone at the hospital contacted the team recently, asking specifically for ponchos. The club donated thousands, the executive said.

Staffers have been complaining about shortages of protective equipment for weeks, and there was a report of fistfights breaking out over masks.

Early in the pandemic, tensions over protective equipment came to a head when a fistfight broke out among workers and visitors at one of the Montefiore hospitals over access to masks, several Montefiore staffers said. After that incident, administrators locked up masks and other gear across the system and began rationing them.

One employee said she feels like "sheep going to slaughter."

An online editorial in the Journal of American Medicine last month listed rain ponchos and “bedbug sheet material” as potential replacements for gowns in a crisis. But some experts have said ponchos would be a poor substitute, in part because they are thinner and flimsier than conventional protective gowns.

In interviews, Montefiore employees noted that the Yankees ponchos do not even cover the arms and have no openings in the back to allow for removal without contamination.

Several employees said they do not think their bosses are taking their concerns seriously.

“Every day when I go to work, I feel like a sheep going to slaughter. My colleagues and I are writing our last will and testament. I’m 28 years old,” said Laura Ucik, a third-year Montefiore resident, at a news conference with the New York State Nurses Association on Thursday.
 

Debater Slayer

Vipassana
Staff member
Premium Member
This is what happens when the world's wealthiest country spends most of its state budget on its army and interventionism and overlooks things like health care and college education.

But the abovementioned economic policies are good because they're not socialist, eh?
 

Stevicus

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
I wonder what other kinds of makeshift, jerry-rigged substitutions one could make for personal protection equipment.

Paper plates with rubber bands attached?
Cocktail napkins stapled together?

Or maybe some kind of solution involving plastic grocery bags?

Come on, where is our ingenuity and American know-how? Let's come up with some ideas!
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
This is what happens when the world's wealthiest country spends most of its state budget on its army and interventionism and overlooks things like health care and college education.

But the abovementioned economic policies are good because they're not socialist, eh?
It's actually the one percenters hoarding all the money for themselves. We've all seen the graphs on how much currency they actually horde to absolutely insane levels.
 
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