‘It’s Starting Again’: Why Filipino Nurses Dread the Second Wave - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/nyregion/filipino-nurses-coronavirus.html
Belinda Ellis had been a nurse for 40 years, and she thought she’d seen it all. She had worked in hospitals in the Philippines, where she was born and got her degree. She was a nurse in Saudi Arabia and then at a military hospital on the border of Iraq when Saddam Hussein came into power.
But when the first wave of the pandemic battered New York City last spring, she still wasn’t prepared. Nor could she have foreseen the immense toll the coronavirus would take on her Filipino colleagues. As devastating as Covid-19 was in those early months, a number of studies now reveal just how hard the virus hit Filipino health care workers. Of all the nurses who died from the virus nationwide, one study found, close to a third of them were Filipino. According to an analsis by ProPublica, in the New York City area alone, at least 30 Filipino health care workers had died from the virus by June.Many of them fell sick, including Erwin Lambrento, a tenacious night shift nurse from the outskirts of Manila who died of the virus in early May. Pictures of him still hang throughout Elmhurst Hospital Center, where Ms. Ellis works.
According to a survey published in September by National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union in the United States, 67 Filipino nurses have died of Covid-19. That figure, which was pulled from public obituaries, is around a third of the total registered nurses who have died nationwide, though Filipinos make up only 4 percent of those nurses overall.“It’s really heartbreaking,” said Zenei Cortez, president of National Nurses United and a nurse from the Philippines herself. Ms. Cortez fears that the true toll is worse. “The numbers we are producing are all underreported, I’m sure of that.”Now another wave of the virus has arrived. The infection rate in New York City has risen in recent weeks, and hospitalizations are at alarming levels; more than 450 New Yorkers have died of Covid since the beginning of 2021. And many Filipino nurses fear their hospitals could again be crushed under caseloads that recall the harrowing months of March and April.Filipino nurses have a long history of working in New York City hospitals, dating at least to the immigration reforms in the 1960s, which broadened the categories of foreign workers who could apply for a United States visa.In the Philippines, nursing schools have taught an American curriculum since as early as 1907, granting degrees to English-speaking nurses who could slot easily into American hospitals. They quickly became invaluable in the 1980s as a solution to staffing shortages exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic. It was in 1986 that Ms. Ellis was recruited by Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, where she was quickly deployed to the bedsides of patients with H.I.V.
San Francisco and New York were especially welcoming to migrant nurses, according to Leo-Felix Jurado, a professor of nursing at William Paterson University in New Jersey who wrote his dissertation on the importation of Filipino nurses into American hospitals.Mr. Jurado, who is now 55, was recruited in 1988 by JFK Medical Center in Edison, N.J. He recalls that visiting the employment fairs held in Manila hotels felt like an afternoon of barhopping. Recruiters jostled to make hires, sweetening work visas to the United States with signing bonuses and promises of free housing, Mr. Jurado said.
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