Los Angeles emergency nurse Sandra Younan spent the last year juggling long hours as she watched as many patients battled the coronavirus and some died.
Then there were the patients who claimed that the virus was fake or that they were coughing up their face, ignoring the rules of the mask. A man was released from the hospital after a positive test for COVID-19 and refused to believe it was accurate.
“You have patients who literally die, and then you have patients who deny the disease,” he said. “You try to educate and you try to educate, but then you just touch a wall.”
False claims about the virus, masks and vaccines have exploded since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic a year ago. Journalists, public health officials and technology companies have tried to back down on falsehoods, but much of the work of correcting misinformation has fallen on the world’s leading medical workers.
In Germany, a video clip showing a nurse using an empty syringe while practicing vaccines traveled widely online as alleged evidence that COVID-19 is fake. Doctors in Afghanistan Patients reported that the US and China created COVID-19 to reduce the world’s population. Bolivia, medical workers had to care for five people who ingested a fake bleaching agent falsely promoted as COVID-19 cure.
Younan, 27, says her friends described her as the “coldest person in history,” but she now deals with anxiety disorder.
“My life is being a nurse, so I don’t care if you’re really sick, you hurt me, whatever it is,” Younan said. “But when you know that what you are doing is wrong and I repeatedly ask you to wear the mask to protect me and you still don’t, it’s like you have no respect for anyone other than yourself. And that’s why this virus is spreading. It just makes you lose hope. ”
Emily Scott, 36, based at a Seattle hospital, has worked around the world on medical missions and helped care for the first COVID-19 patient in the U.S. last year. She was selected for her experience working in Sierra Leone during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.
While many Americans were afraid of Ebola, a disease that is not as contagious as coronavirus and poses a small threat to the United States, they are not very afraid of COVID-19, he said.
Scott blames a number of factors: the frightening symptoms of Ebola, racism against Africans, and the politicization of COVID-19 by American elected officials.
“I felt much safer in Sierra Leone during Ebola than at the beginning of this outbreak in the United States,” Scott said, due to the number of people who ignored social distancing guidelines. “Things that are facts and science have become politicized.”
Emergency nurse Erin Ogle has heard a litany of false claims about the virus while working at a hospital in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas. They include: The virus is no worse than the flu. It is caused by 5G wireless towers. Masks do not help and can hurt. Or, the most painful thing for her: the virus is not real and doctors and nurses are engaged in a major global conspiracy to hide the truth.
“It feels so defeated and makes you ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ said Ogle, 40.
Nurses tend to be the health care providers with the most contact with patients, and patients often find nurses more accessible, according to Professor Maria Brann, a health communications expert at Indiana University and Purdue University. Indianapolis. This means that nurses are more likely to come across patients who spread misinformation, which gives them a special opportunity to intervene.
“Nurses have always been advocating patients, but this pandemic has thrown them a lot more,” Brann said. “It simply came to our notice then. It ‘s not necessarily what they signed up for. “
In some cases, nurses and other health workers spread the wrong information. And many nurses say they find falsehoods about the coronavirus vaccine in their own families.
For 31-year-old Brenda Olmos, a practicing nurse in Austin, Texas, who focuses on a population of geriatric and Hispanic patients, it was a no-brainer to get the vaccine. But first he had to debate his parents, who had heard unfounded claims that the shooting would cause infertility. and Bell’s palsy to television programs in Spanish.
Olmos eventually convinced her parents to get the vaccine as well, but she worries about the vaccine’s hesitation in her community.
When he recently met an elderly patient with cancerous tumors, Olmos knew that the growths had taken years to develop. But the adult children of the man who had recently gotten the vaccine insisted the two were connected.
“To them, it seemed too casual,” Olmos said. “I just wanted them not to have that guilt.”
Olmos said the real problem with misinformation is not just the bad actors who spread lies, but that people believe false claims because they don’t feel so comfortable navigating often complex medical findings.
“Low health literacy is the real pandemic,” he said. “As health care providers, we have a duty to provide information in a way that is pleasant and easy to understand, so that people do not consume misinformation because they cannot digest the actual data.”
When Texas Gov. Greg Abbott lifted the mask state mandate this month against the guidance of many scientists, practicing nurse Guillermo Carnegie described the decision as “spitting in the face.”
“I was disgusted,” Carnegie, 34, of Temple, Texas, said. “This governor and different people act like, ‘Oh, we’re proud of our front-line workers, we support them.’ But then they do something like that, and it greatly burdens the medical field.”
Brian Southwell, who started a program at Duke University School of Medicine to train medical professionals on how to talk to uninformed patients, said providers should see the patient they trust as an opportunity.
“This patient has enough confidence in you to generate this information for you,” Southwell said. “And so that’s good, even if you don’t agree with it.”
He said medical workers should resist entering the “academic argumentation mode” and instead find out why patients have certain beliefs and whether they might be open to other ideas.
This act of listening is essential to building trust, according to Dr. Seema Yasmin, a doctor, journalist and professor at Stanford University who studies medical misinformation.
“Leave the pen, put the notebook down and listen,” Yasmin said.
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Associated Press writer John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this report.
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More AP coverage of the first year of the pandemic: pandemic: one year