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A D.C. protest without people: Activists demand PPE for health care workers on front line of coronavirus pandemic
With mandatory social distancing guidelines and stay-at-home orders in effect throughout the region, and given the grueling demands of their jobs as the deadly coronavirus continues to spread, it would have been nearly impossible to assemble 1,000 health-care workers outside Congress this week.
Instead, volunteers put up 1,000 signs to stand on the lawn in their absence.
Activists who are used to relying on people power to amplify messages and picket lawmakers have been forced to use alternative protest tactics amid the pandemic.
Half a dozen volunteers with liberal activist group MoveOn pressed lawn signs into the grass outside the Capitol as the sun peaked over the Statue of Freedom.
On each sign was a message.
Some, bearing the blue Star of Life seen on the uniforms of doctors, first responders and emergency medical technicians, reiterated a hashtag that has made the rounds on social media for weeks, accompanying posts from desperate front-line workers who say they are running out of necessary protective equipment: #GetUsPPE.
Others showed photos of medical workers in scrubs and hair nets and baseball caps. Some wore face shields and plastic visors. Others donned gloves.
One barefaced doctor in a white lab coat held up a hand-drawn sign. “Trump,” it said. “Where’s my mask?”
Health-care providers in hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, assisted-living facilities and rehabilitation centers have for weeks begged for more PPE to protect themselves and their vulnerable patients.
States and hospitals have been running out of supplies and struggling to find more. The national stockpile is nearly out of N95 respirator masks, face shields, gowns and other critical equipment, the Department of Health and Human Services announced last week.
“Health-care workers are on the front lines of this crisis, and they’re risking their lives to save ours every day, and our government, from the very top of this administration on down, has not used the full force of what they have with the Defense Production Act to ensure [workers] have the PPE they need and deserve,” said Rahna Epting, the executive director of MoveOn. “We wanted to show that these are real people who are demanding that this government protect them.”
Unlike protests that have erupted from Michigan to Ohio to Virginia demanding that states flout social distancing practices and reopen the economy immediately, organizers with MoveOn said they wanted to adhere to health guidelines that instruct people not to gather in large groups.
“Normally, we’d want everyone down here,” said MoveOn volunteer Robby Diesu, 32, as he looked out over the rows of signs. “We wanted to find a way to show the breadth of this problem without putting anyone in harm’s way.”
A large white sign propped at the back of the display announced in bold letters: “Social distancing in effect. Please do not congregate.”
The volunteers who put up the signs live in the same house and have been quarantining under the same roof for weeks. Still, as they worked, several wore masks over their face to protect passersby — even though there were few.
A handful of joggers stopped to take pictures as the sun rose.
One man, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is a government employee, said he supported the idea.
“I’m so used to seeing protests out here by the Capitol that it really is bizarre to see how empty it is,” he said. “But this is really impressive to me.”
By sharing images and video on social media of front-line workers telling their stories, MoveOn organizers said they hope to galvanize people in the same way as a traditional rally with a lineup of speakers.
Activists planned to deliver a petition to Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) with more than 2 million signatures urging Congress to require the delivery of more PPE to front-line workers. Murphy has been a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force and its reliance on private companies to deliver an adequate amount of critical gear, such as N95 respirator masks, medical gowns, gloves and face shields, to health-care workers.
“In this critical hour, FEMA should make organized, data-informed decisions about where, when, and in what quantities supplies should be delivered to states — not defer to the private sector to allow them to profit off this pandemic,” the senator wrote last week in a letter to Vice President Pence, co-signed by 44 Democratic and two independent senators.
Organizers said the signs would remain on the Capitol lawn all day, but that the demonstration was only the beginning of a spate of atypical ones the group expects to launch this month.
Epting described activists’ energy as “more intense” than usual as the pandemic drags on.
“The energy is very high, the intensity is very high,” she said. “That’s forcing us to be creative and ingenuitive in order to figure out how to protest in a social distancing posture and keep one another safe at the same time.”
To save lives, social distancing must continue longer than we expect
The lessons of the 1918 flu pandemic.
But the experience of 1918 also reminds us that early, layered (i.e., more than one at the same time) and lengthy mitigation measures are the best strategy. For social distancing to work, it must be sweeping and enforced across a wide swath of the community. Essential businesses will, of course, need to continue. All other places where people congregate should cease operations for the time being. In 1918, social distancing measures were kept in place for many weeks, if not months, even if people and businesses did not always support them. But the key lesson: This approach worked.
By now, many have read of the comparisons between St. Louis, where a decisive health commissioner reacted with amazing rapidity to implement sweeping public health orders, and Philadelphia, which chose to stay open, even going ahead with plans for a huge parade.
St. Louis was rewarded with one of the best outcomes of any large U.S. city. Philadelphia’s fateful decision to carry on with its immense Liberty Loan Parade resulted in a massive spike in influenza cases in the days immediately following. The city endured some of the worst numbers of cases and deaths in the United States as a result.
Philadelphia was hardly alone, however. In Baltimore, the health commissioner dragged his feet when a group of physicians requested that the city ban public gatherings. “We do not consider such drastic steps necessary in view of the extreme low civilian death rate in the city,” he told them. More than 4,100 Baltimoreans lost their lives to the epidemic.
In Atlanta, the mayor sided with business interests and reopened the city after just three weeks of closures, over the vocal objections of his Board of Health. When the board predicted that Atlanta’s epidemic peak would not occur for another nine days, the mayor dismissed the science, arguing that there was no way to foretell future conditions. The city health officer sided with the mayor, mistakenly declaring that the peak had passed. It had not, and Atlanta’s fall wave of the epidemic raged on, unchecked, through the end of 1918. “The influenza situation in Atlanta is up to the people themselves,” the Public Safety Committee declared.
Atlanta may be a more extreme example, but its experience was hardly singular. In every city we studied from this era there was public pressure to quit the social distancing measures as soon as the epidemic seemed to peak and then ebb. Thinking that the proverbial coast was clear, many communities lifted social distancing measures before the battle was truly over. After weeks of being denied their usual social outlets, people were eager to return to a life of normalcy, and they did so in one giant rush. In city after city, masses lined up for movie houses and performance theaters, crowds packed into dance halls and cabarets, and throngs flocked to downtown shopping districts, often on the very day that the closure orders were lifted.
The result? Cases and deaths resurged. Most cities closed their schools once again. But the political, economic and social will to issue another round of sweeping business closures and gathering bans had evaporated as people grew weary of the dislocations of social distancing. In some cities, most notably Denver, Kansas City, Milwaukee and even the vaunted St. Louis, this second peak was even deadlier than the first.
Lastly, 1918 teaches us how quickly an unchecked epidemic can overwhelm our health-care infrastructure. Philadelphia had to erect 32 temporary hospitals just to handle its massive number of influenza cases. On a single day in mid-October, 10 trucks were needed to carry the bodies of indigent victims to the city’s potter’s field. Some of the deceased had to be buried in temporary graves until more permanent plots could be dug.
In Pittsburgh, the epidemic grew so bad that a local sporting club had to donate its tents to use as field hospitals. One San Antonio hospital had to rely on 18 student nurses to tend to hundreds of influenza patients; the 12 regular nurses were all sick with influenza themselves. Nashville’s City Hospital was overrun with cases in a single day. These cities, unfortunately, were not alone in their experiences.
Today we have two notable advantages over those in 1918: We know the causative agent of covid-19, and our medical care is far more advanced. In 1918, scientists believed the epidemic was caused by a bacterium, and the influenza virus would not be discovered for another quarter-century. The standard medical treatment for influenza victims in 1918 consisted of little more than propping patients up to prevent them from choking on their sputum. Today, it is only a matter of time before researchers discover pharmaceutical therapies and develop an effective vaccine against the disease. In 2020, physicians have the ability to drive down the fatality rate of this epidemic through the use ventilators and intensive care units — as long as such lifesaving machines are available.
Our health-care system can only do this, however, if we don’t allow our already-taxed hospitals, physicians and nurses to be overrun with cases. That means that, until an effective vaccine can be developed and deployed, we must “flatten the curve.” This will not be accomplished in a week, or even a month. We must implement and coordinate sweeping non-pharmaceutical interventions on a national level and keep these measures in place as long as necessary. These measures are not perfect. They are slow and plodding. They are socially and economically disruptive. They fracture the routines of our daily lives in myriad ways, large and small. They do not magically end epidemics. But they can save lives.
As we all endure the hardships of the covid-19 pandemic and dislocations of social distancing, we can take heart that together we will save lives. Just as our forebears did a century ago.
And that is the most important lesson of 1918.
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HENRY KOTULA 