Nurses did not sign up for this kind of pressure

摘要

When one of the UK's first COVID-19 patients was diagnosed at my hospital last March, it struck me that many of my colleagues may be experiencing the same rollercoaster of emotions I once did as an HIV nurse. There are many parallels between nursing in the coronavirus pandemic and the HIV epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s. All the staff exposed to that patient with COVID-19 were sent home to self-isolate: two weeks to wait to get sick or not. Back when I worked with people with HIV, staff feared needlestick injuries. In the event of such exposure, we had to wait three months to see if we were antibody-negative.