LOS ANGELES — Three days after being released from Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital, Gilbert Torres returned on a stretcher, a clear tube snaking from his nose to an oxygen tank. It was the last place he wanted to be.
But Mr. Torres, 30, who had just spent two weeks on a ventilator in the intensive care unit, wasn’t there because his condition had worsened. He was there to visit a new outpatient clinic for Covid-19 survivors, intended to address their lingering physical and psychic wounds — and to help keep them from needing to be readmitted.
WASHINGTON — The Covid-19 vaccine had finally come to Forest Hills of D.C., a nursing home in a prosperous neighborhood of the nation’s capital, but there was a problem. Though nearly all of the home’s residents agreed to get the shots, nearly half its 200 staff members declined.
Tina Sandri, the chief executive, vowed not to let those numbers stand.
Over the next two months, rounding out the most bruising year of her long career in elder care, Ms. Sandri tried everything. She bombarded employees with text messages containing facts about the science behind the vaccines. She assigned a popular young worker to try to sway reluctant colleagues as an “influencer.” She set up a giant screen to show a television special that the Black actor and director Tyler Perry made to fight vaccine hesitancy — on a continuous loop, no less. Most of all, she worked to understand their concerns.
“You really have to listen to each person’s story and address it from that standpoint, so they feel, ‘This is a workplace that cares about me,’” she said.
Two Nigerian nurses were attacked by the family of a deceased COVID-19 patient. One nurse had her hair ripped out and suffered a fracture. The second was beaten into a coma.
The Pentagon has authorized more than 1,000 active-duty service members to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with its vaccination effort against COVID-19.
The 1,110 active-duty troops will be broken up into teams of 222 people to support five state vaccination sites, according to a Defense Department fact sheet released Friday.
White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients called the effort a “critical part of our all of government response.”
An initial group of 222 will be deployed to a site in California in the coming days, top Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby told reporters later on Friday.
“We expect that they’ll be able to get on site on or about the 15th of this month,” Kirby said, referring questions to FEMA as to the exact location.
.... Doctors, paramedics and nurses’ aides have been hailed in the United States as frontline Covid-19 warriors, but gone are the days when people applauded workers outside hospitals and on city streets. A year into the pandemic, with emergency rooms packed again, vaccines in short supply and more contagious variants of the virus threatening to unleash a fresh wave of infections, medical workers are feeling burned out and unappreciated.
Some health care experts are calling for a national effort to track the psychological well-being of medical professionals, much like the federal health program that monitors workers who responded to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
A little more than a third of nursing home workers have been getting COVID-19 vaccines when the shots are first offered, U.S. health officials said Monday.
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