Nevada RNformation - March 2011

Page 12 • Nevada RNformation March, April, May 2021
Antimicrobial Stewardship – Infection Prevention
It’s time to join forces and defeat Sars-CoV-2
Norman Wright, RN, BSN, MS
It is February 19, 2021
and last year, on this date,
I was attending Nevada’s
Legislative Committee
on Health Care providing
information regarding the
Pan Drug Resistant Organism
(PDRO), Carbapenem Resistant
Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) and
other Multiple Drug Resistant
Organisms (MDRO). I was
promoting legislation to mandate use of the Inter-
Facility Infection Prevention Transfer Form. (1), (2)
During the February 19, 2020 session Nevada’s
State Epidemiologist, Melissa Peek, presented
Nevada’s “Update Concerning the Novel
Coronavirus COVID-19 Outbreak.” Her
comprehensive PowerPoint showed Nevada’s quick
response and preparedness efforts to combat
Coronavirus even though she documented that there
were no confirmed cases in Nevada yet. A more
detailed account of Nevada’s DPBH initial response
can be found in my May, 2020 RNformation article.
The May article, written in February, 2020,
documented the confusion that mixed messaging
was generating. This statement was included:
“COVID-19 stories and predictions are ubiquitous
ranging from a USA Today headline, “Trump
says Coronavirus will be gone by April when the
weather gets warmer”, to a February 11th New
York Post article with this lead, “The coronavirus
epidemic could grip about two-thirds of the world’s
population if the deadly bug is not controlled.” (3)
Unfortunately, the latter is happening. As of
February 19, 2021, worldwide cases total over one
hundred eleven million (111,000,000) and over two
million four hundred thousand (2,4000,000) have
died. Nevada has not been spared. We have over
290,000 confirmed cases and 4,831 deaths to date.
Last year we were “all in this together” until
around mid-April, when unity evaporated and
we began to choose sides. The divide widened
throughout the summer and it continues to date.
Which side you are on, in large part, depends on
the political party that you belong to and what news
sources you obtain your information from.
The red vs. blue divide widened, in large part
due to certain media outlets that promote disputed
science, mis-information, conspiracy theories
disguised as medical research, fake “cures,” and
repeating that the virus will “just disappear.” Basic
public health recommendations to socially distance
and wear a mask were disputed and fights even
erupted when someone was asked to put on a mask.
Please refer to my August, 2020 article: Coronavirus
and PDRO – Fake, Faux and Phony News which
delves into this in greater depth. The main thrusts
of the article were to use the five step “Nursing
Process”, and critical thinking, to sort truth from
fiction and that obtaining accurate, straightforward,
data is essential to accomplish this.
My September 2020 article began with the
Serenity Prayer:
God Grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.
And I still must say it because I am angry at how
this pandemic, in my opinion, has been mishandled.
By Memorial Day the political lines were drawn
and the divide was exacerbated by the politics of the
November elections, political divides that remain.
Now, a year later, the virus that was supposed
to be gone by last April is still ravaging us. Yes, the
rates have gone down from January 14th when the
7-day moving average of deaths was 46 per day and
the average number of positive cases is also down.
(4)
Although this is good news, there is a danger
because each time we thought the pandemic
was over mandates were relaxed and Sars-CoV2
infections roared back. Now there are new viral
strains that are more contagious and possibly more
deadly, and a man with the South Africa strain was
just discovered in Reno.
Some of the deaths that occurred during the past
year could not have been prevented, but if we all
simply agreed to wear a mask and socially distance
for the past year our number of infections and
deaths would have been much lower.
One way to illustrate this is to use a projection
that IHME made last June. The lower green line
represents a flattening of the curve if 95% of
us wore masks and the upper red line shows a
continued upward trend if we didn’t. Reality was
many refused to wear masks or socially distance
and the red trend line never went down. The result,
Nevada will soon experience it’s 5,000th COVID-19
death.
Another way to show that masks work is to
compare Japan’s infection and death rates to
Nevada’s. To date Japan, a nation of over 126 million
people has only had 7,274 deaths from COVID-19,
which averages out to 58 deaths per million.
Compare that to Nevada, with a population of just
over three million, and we have had 4,831 deaths,
equaling 1,568 deaths per million. Space does not
allow me to expand on reasons for the disparity
beyond documenting that in Japan wearing a mask
to avoid getting, or passing on, an infection has
been a common practice for decades and groups like
“No Mask Nevada” do not exist.
On February 23rd I will be giving an hour-long
presentation for Immunize Nevada titled, “How
Politicization and Disinformation Impacted the
Mitigation of COVID-19” which will expand on
the reasons for the disparity in Sars-CoV-2 infections
and deaths comparing the United States with other
nations in the world. By the time you read this article
that webinar will be history, but the presentation
will be archived and found at this link: https://www.
immunizenevada.org/nile-webinars.
Flash forward to 2021. We now have two
vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, and more may be
on the way, which brings me back to February 19,
2020, when I was advocating for codification of
the Infection Prevention Transfer Form and laws to
enforce mandates regarding accurate communication
of infectious concerns when a patient is transferred
from one facility to another.
The February 2020 session date was the third time
I appeared before the Legislative Health Committee
and one recurring theme during all three sessions
that I witnessed was promoted by group of women,
and a few men, who repeatedly testified about the
dangers of vaccinations. This group, commonly
known as Anti-Vaxxers told personal stories along