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I’m Putting My Body On the Line for Twelve Dollars An Hour.
If essential workers are heroes, why don’t they pay us like it?
Since the early days of March, the medical director of the nursing home where I work was warning our administrators that it was a matter of if, not when the deadly and incredibly contagious coronavirus entered the facility. In the weeks that have followed no matter what precautions we put in to place, it’s been difficult to escape the feeling that the building is a ticking time bomb. Last week, that bomb went off, and our first resident tested positive for COVID-19.
Subsequently, every single resident in the building and every single employee has been tested for the virus, and we were baffled to learn that she was the only one who’s tested positive out of everyone. Given the way this virus is so capable of spreading, even on the soles of our shoes, just having a handful of residents and employees test positive would have been excellent in terms of containment. It simply does not make sense that it was a single resident and no staff. It appears as though there’s at least a chance that she was an extremely rare false positive, and her sample could have been contaminated at the lab. She’s scheduled for a re-test, and staff is cautiously optimistic.
