Editor’s note 2/27/2020: The letter this article was based on has since been retracted by The Lancet. You can see our additional coverage on the retraction here.
As they try to fight the COVID-19 outbreak, medical staff in China are suffering from the seemingly endless slog of work, new cases, and the coronavirus itself.
Nurses in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began, are fainting on the job, developing painful rashes, sores, hypoglycemia, and psychological exhaustion — and that’s why two of them published an impassioned plea for help from the rest of the world in the journal The Lancet on Sunday.
“While we are professional nurses, we are also human. Like everyone else, we feel helplessness, anxiety, and fear,” the authors, Yingchun Zeng and Yan Zhen, both from hospitals in Guangzhou, wrote. “Experienced nurses occasionally find the time to comfort colleagues and try to relieve our anxiety. But even experienced nurses may also cry, possibly because we do not know how long we need to stay here and we are the highest-risk group for COVID-19 infection.”
Nearly 2,000 medical workers helping COVID-19 patients in China have been infected, and at least nine have died. Meanwhile, the nurses write that the safety measures they have to follow, like quadruple-layering gloves and constantly wearing and washing tight respirators that are giving them bedsores, are simultaneously making them sick and rendering them useless as caregivers.
For instance, unpackaging medical supplies and giving a patient a shot while wearing four layers of latex gloves is particularly difficult.
“Due to an extreme shortage of health-care professionals in Wuhan, 14,000…
