Michael Hiltzik: Nurses know we were unprepared for the coronavirus. They're being punished for speaking out
When Chelsea Halmy reported for her nighttime shift in the COVID-19 unit at Providence St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on April 11, she made what she thought was a routine request: to be provided with an N95 respirator mask before coming into contact with patients.
As she knew, the N95 masks were the most effective in the hospital's stock for blocking potential infection by the novel coronavirus that causes the disease. Her supervisor said no; standard surgical masks were good enough, she was told.
When Halmy refused to treat patients without the N95 equipment, she was brought into a closed room where a supervisor, reading from a script that Halmy captured with her smartphone, threatened her with a charge of insubordination and a report to the state Board of Registered Nursing for "patient abandonment," which could result in the loss of her nursing license.
Per Halmy's telling, the supervisor named a COVID-19
