Nevada RNformation - March 2011

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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
March, April, May 2021 Nevada RNformation • Page 13 with other comments that focused on these main areas of criticisms to vaccination: 1) Discredited autism/mercury/thimerosal statements 2) Pseudo-science, fake news and alternative facts 3) That Immunize Nevada is a shill for bigpharma vaccine companies 4) That people promoting vaccines will “burn in hell” because vaccines are made from aborted fetus. Vaccine proponents were even compared to Nazis. 5) And that the lawmakers should “do more research.” That last statement about doing research I agree with, but the research must be from valid sources, not conspiracy theorists. All of the legislative committee hearings are taped and if you want to spend some time you can view their comments by going to Nevada Legislative archived videos that is found at this link: https://www.leg.state.nv.us/ Video/. All you have to do is put in the date of the session you are interested to view and it will come up. And the anti-vaxxers are at it again to the point of disrupting a mass vaccination site at Dodger Stadium in California. A few anti-vaxxers brought up “herd immunity” and that is the danger of their movement. If they convince a large enough portion of our population that vaccines are dangerous and discourage enough of us from becoming vaccinated the pandemic could slam us again with a fourth wave, possibly bigger than the one we have just been through. If that occurs not only will more physical suffering and death occur, but Nevada’s economy, which is so dependent on tourism, will not recover either. A good resource to address the anti-vaccination movement is a website called, “Shots Heard Round the World.” It provides resources to combat the disinformation and intimidation that some members of this group distribute. (6) https://www.shotsheard. org/ It is time for our red vs. blue, North against South, rural vs. urban, us against them – mentality to end. It is time for us to put aside our political divides, join forces and work together in unison to fight the war on Sars-CoV-2. It is time to create common goals and defeat the virus that has been ravaging us for the past year. Citations: 1) http://dpbh.nv.gov/Programs/HAI/dta/Forms/ Healthcare_Associated_Infection_Prevention_and_ Control_(HAI)_-_Forms/ 2) http://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/dpbh.nv.gov/ content/Programs/HAI/dta/CRE%20technical%20 bulletin.pdf 3) https://nypost.com/2020/02/11/expert-warnscoronavirus-could-infect-60-of-worlds-population/ 4) https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/usa/ nevada/ 5) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/us/californiacovid-vaccine.html 6) https://www.shotsheard.org/
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