SAN JOSE – The only sign of holiday excitement on Christmas morning in the emergency department at Kaiser Permanent San Jose was a wreath-laying at the doctors’ station.
So Levitt’s moment was a welcome relief when a staff member arrived on the morning of December 25 wearing a flowery Christmas tree costume in the hall’s boundary.
“She was just having fun,” said the nurse who worked that morning.
Instead, her battery-powered, air-powered suit could spread the coronavirus during the ER. In the days that followed, 44 staff members were infected, and on Sunday night Kaiser announced that one of the employees working on Christmas Day had died, a tragedy that is making headlines worldwide. It was not clear on Monday whether any unit visitors or patients were also infected.
To spread the cheer, the employee wore an air-powered suit to the Kaiser Permanent San Jose Medical Center Xmas Day in the Emergency Department. It turns out that the employee was unknowingly covid, now 43 employees are covid. Kycher Blair is investigating whether he helped spread the virus. pic.twitter.com/DLLi8z5e2T
– Marianne Favre (@MareneFavre) January 3, 2021
Many sick employees had already received the first dose from the first dose of COVID vaccination in the previous week, Kaiser said, but its partial efficacy – which usually starts in about 10 days – did not kick off. There were no symptoms at the time but a positive test was performed later.
In an interview Monday, the nurse – who did not want to be named because she was afraid for her job – gave one of her first internal accounts of how the deadly virus spread. He explained that between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., a woman in uniform appeared at the Swayambhu Central Nurse Station. She said the nurse, while wearing a mask and face shield, interacted with a woman dressed about six feet away.
Two days later, on December 27, the nurse fell ill and has been ill with mild COVID-19 symptoms ever since. She said most of her coworkers started feeling sick at the same time, and while she is aware of coworkers who have severe symptoms, she doesn’t believe anyone is hospitalized.
How can a tree suit with a red nose and a silly smile be a deadly superprider? The battery-powered fan helps climb trees and can trap more viral drops than a normal person-to-second spread.
The nurse insisted that there was no party or gathering around the woman in the attire and that her arrival in the tree attire was “momentary” and unplanned. Everyone in the emergency department wears a mask, the nurse said, and “we don’t hug.”
Preliminary reports misrepresenting the party atmosphere in the emergency department, “We have been drawn into the light of being irresponsible while working our butts to save lives. We are not watching our families. It portrayed us as not caring about our community. “
The annual Christmas party was long canceled, and unlike in previous years, no one wore Santa hats or candy cane headbands in the ER – they are very easy to wrap in facial ield and protective respirators.
The nurse said the Juventus Christmas tree was “so innocent.”
As she describes it, “You’ll just see this Christmas tree tied to you, and it’ll make you laugh. It was a short moment of goodness, and you get back to work.”
The death of a staff member – reportedly the registration clerk – is a terrible blow to hospital staff who are already tired after 10 months of treating covid patients and are a “heavy burden” for the woman in the uniform.
The tragedy is “like death in a family,” the nurse said.
“We’re physically exhausted and emotionally already taxed, and this is more than that,” he said. “People don’t realize that they take the toll and they take it to come and what we do. Yes, we have chosen this business and we are all very good at our job, but when you lose a family member it will not be any more stressful or less emotional or less devastating. “
The Santa Clara County Health Department is investigating the outbreak.
“Obviously, this is a very unusual situation in which well-intentioned staff members work on their own without prior notice or approval,” Kaiser Parment, senior vice president and area manager, said in a statement from San Jose Medical Center.
Hospital contact tracing has been conducted to inform and test employees or patients who were exposed and who are adding weekly testing.
The hospital did not respond Monday to whether the woman in the suit was working shifts that day. He said he was investigating whether he had spread the virus from people who worked in the morning. It also did not explain its coronavirus testing policy, which the nurse said is a sore spot for a number of nurses who complained that the hospital began more rigorous testing of staff only after the outbreak.
Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco, said the outbreak appeared to be a combination of “a lot of unfortunate things”, including the unusual air-blowing suit and the timing of the vaccine dose.
However, there is little difference depending on whether the vaccine is Pfizer or Modern, usually taking about two weeks to be about 80-90% effective. Within the first 10-14 days, it’s as effective as 50%, she said.
“That’s why some health care workers have got a dose and are still getting covid,” Gandhi said.
The Kaiser nurse said he was still amazed that this suit with a battery-powered fan could wreak so much havoc and that people didn’t realize that even those who worked the next day got sick.
The nurse said, “It doesn’t make perfect sense that it was all hers because it was just a moment of time compared to what we all deal with all the time.” “How can it be that if it happened at 9 this morning or people got infected at 3 in the afternoon? Can this happen Yes. But was it a tragic coincidence or something else? We do not know. ”
The report was contributed by staff writers Emily DeRoy and Evan Webk.
