It seems inconceivable that in the United States, which surpassed the sinister milestone of half a million deaths by covid-19, A company bans its workers from wearing mouthpieces. However, this happened less than a year ago at one of Florida’s largest supermarket chains, when the coronavirus spread around the world and terror began to set in.
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At this time Gerardo Gutiérrez, 70, worked at a Publix supermarket branch in Miami Beach.
He died in late April after contracting coronavirus in March, the horrible month in which he died declared the pandemic, in which Italy entered a national confinement that caused astonishment in the West and in which the dead in United States they still numbered in the hundreds.
“We were all in a panic”, Recalls his daughter Ariane, suing her in a civil lawsuit against Publix for culpable homicide. There he alleges that a colleague who worked very close to Gutiérrez coughed and had other symptoms of a virus, but Publix he then banned his employees from wearing masks, because “they didn’t want to scare customers.”
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“The result was that my father died”, Says the daughter at home in Miami Beach. “I had gone to work every day without any caps or gloves, and no
they allowed him to use them “.
March 23, Miami Beach it was the first city in Florida to order confinement and close its beaches. But Publix waited until the first week of April to allow its employees to wear masks voluntarily, according to demand.
The change in policy came late for Gutierrez, who was already very ill. He was hospitalized on April 10, and on the 28th, his friends and family were firing him for Zoom. He died that day.
“He loved to swim. He was very active, very vital. He could have lived many more years,” says Ariane, showing photographs of the father, who was Cuban. Two weeks ago, a judge rejected a request from the supermarket chain to treat the complaint as a labor compensation claim and not as a lawsuit. The company did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
“We keep paying”
In early March, Miami Beach was still in the middle of its busiest season. It is the time when students from all over the country take spring break and celebrate their youth on the beaches of Florida as if there were no tomorrow.
There was much talk then about the island’s inopportune party atmosphere in front of Miami, when much of the country first adopted rules of social distancing – a term hitherto unknown.
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“People were slow to pay attention,” remembers Ariane Gutiérrez. “And we still haven’t gotten over that“This month the businesses closed, the shelves were emptied and the shortage of masks became dangerous. Therefore, the health authorities at first did not recommend its use to the general public, to ensure that medical staff had sufficient stocks.
“This message at the beginning of the pandemic was a major strategic public health mistake”, Says Purnima Madhivanan, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona.
Also, in a bewildering way for health workers and scientists, the mouthpieces it became a political statement because Donald Trump, who was president, refused for months to take it. Sometimes he even teased those who did. “These mixed messages confuse people,” says the epidemiologist.
“And we keep paying for it. Masks are key.”
Ariane Gutiérrez looking at a photo of her father Gerardo Gutiérrez.
Living with covid
One of the lessons of these episodes, according to the expert, is that, “As much as we want to say that science prevails, science is as good as the messengers who communicate it.”
A January study of the University of Southern California found that a large majority (between 80 and 90%) of Americans believe they use masks it is an effective way to protect against covid-19, but only half of them use them consistently.
This shows that “Knowledge does not necessarily become behavior”, Madhivanan laments. It was initially believed that the warm weather killed the virus, that shopping bags had to be disinfected, that race was a factor – it turns out that inequality was the factor – and many, like Gutierrez, suffered the damage of misinformation.
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Some things have changed (who continues to disinfect tomato cans?), But others, such as the use of mouthpieces, should be as “normalized” in the West as they are in Asian countries, warns the epidemiologist . “We’re going to have to live with the covid,” he says.
“There will never be a time when we can say the covid is gone. We just have to learn to manage it, like the flu.”
AFP
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