Viral
‘No Beds Means No Beds’ — Nurse Talks About What People Don’t Understand About COVID
“No beds for your stroke, no beds for your sick child.”
A 26-year-old neurocritical nurse speaks up about the crisis that hospitals are facing with the pandemic. Alexis Hinkley, who used to work as a travel nurse in rural Oregon most recently, has been transferred to the emergency department for the past month due to the place being shorthanded.
She’s taken to TikTok to talk about what the hospital feels like right now.
“One thing that I wish more non-medical people understood when they bring up the ‘survival rate’ of COVID is that no beds in the hospital means no beds,” she explains.
“You might be very comfortable with the survival rate of COVID,” she continued. “But how comfortable are you with the survival rate of a massive M1 MCA stroke with no TPA because we can’t accept you at any of your local hospitals because our [emergency department] is overflowing with patients already?”
“Are you comfortable with those odds? I bet the f**k not,” she answered it herself.
“Last January was some of the darkest shit I’ve ever seen in my life. Shoveling dead bodies out to refrigerated trucks in parking lots. And on the worst days that we had, we were still only averaging 3,000 deaths a day from COVID. We are looking at 10,000 deaths a day in early February.”
“No beds means no f**king beds. You die alone, at home. Your parents die alone, at home.”
“Please, please start listening to the healthcare workers when they scream for you to help us,” she pleaded.
@travelingnurse No beds means no beds #icunurse #omicron original sound – Lex RN BSN
People understood what she meant.
