Sandra Younan, a Los Angeles emergency nurse, has been testing for hours over the past year watching many patients struggle with the coronavirus and some die.
Then there were the patients who claimed the virus was fake or coughed into her face, and ignored the mask rules. One man storms the hospital after a positive COVID-19 test and refuses to believe it is accurate.
“You have patients who literally die, and then you have patients who deny the disease,” she said. “You try to educate and you try to educate, but then you just hit a wall.”
Fraudulent allegations about the virus, masks and vaccines have exploded since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic a year ago. Journalists, public health officials and technology companies have tried to reverse the lies, but much of the work to correct misinformation has had the world’s leading medical workers.
In Germany, a video clip showing a nurse using an empty syringe during vaccinations, has traveled widely online as alleged evidence that COVID-19 is fake. Doctors in Afghanistan reports patients telling that COVID-19 was created by the US and China to reduce the world population. In Boliviamedical workers had to look after five people who ingested a toxic bleach that was falsely considered a COVID-19 remedy.
Younan, 27, says her friends used to describe her as the “coldest person ever”, but now she’s dealing with crushing anxiety.
“My life is to be a nurse, so it does not matter to me if you are really sick, you throw me up, whatever,” Younan said. ‘But if you know what you’re doing is wrong, and I repeatedly ask you to please wear your mask to protect me, and you still do not, it’s like you do not consider anyone but yourself. And therefore this virus spreads. It just makes you lose hope. ”
Emily Scott, 36, who is based in a Seattle hospital, worked on medical missions worldwide and helped care for the first American COVID-19 patient last year. She was selected because of her experience in Sierra Leone during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.
While many Americans were terrified of Ebola – a disease that is not nearly as contagious as the coronavirus and poses little threat in the U.S. – they are not nearly scared enough of COVID-19, she said.
Scott blames a few factors: Ebola’s frightening symptoms, racism against Africans and the politicization of COVID-19 by US elected officials.
“I felt so much safer in Sierra Leone during Ebola than at the beginning of this outbreak in the US,” Scott said because of the number of people who do not obey the guidelines for social distance and mask. “Things that are facts and science have been politicized.”
Nurse L’Erin Ogle heard a number of false allegations about the virus while working in a hospital in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas. These include: The virus is no worse than flu. This is caused by 5G wireless towers. Masks do not help and can hurt. Or, most painful to her: the virus is not real, and doctors and nurses are engaged in a major global conspiracy to conceal the truth.
“It just feels so defeated, and it makes you ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’ said Ogle, 40.
Nurses are often the healthcare providers with the most patient contact, and patients often consider nurses to be more accessible, according to Professor Maria Brann, a health communications expert at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. This means that nurses are more likely to encounter patients who disseminate incorrect information, giving them a special opportunity to intervene.
“Nurses have always been patient advocates, but this pandemic has thrown so much more at them,” Brann said. “It can definitely take a toll. This is not necessarily what they signed up for. ”
In some cases, it is nurses and other health professionals who spread the wrong information. And many nurses say they experience falsehoods about the coronavirus vaccine in their own families.
For Brenda Olmos, 31, a nurse in Austin, Texas, who focuses on a geriatric and Spanish patient population, it is not wise to get the vaccine. But first she had to debate about her parents, who heard unfounded allegations that the shot would cause infertility and Bell’s paralysis on Spanish-language TV shows.
Olmos eventually convinced her parents to get the vaccine as well, but she is worried about getting vaccinated in her community.
When she recently encountered an elderly patient with cancerous tumors, Olmos knew the growth took years to develop. But the man’s adult children who recently got him the vaccine insisted the two be connected.
“To them, it just seemed too coincidental,” Olmos said. “I just wish they did not have those feelings of guilt.”
Olmos said the real problem with misinformation is not just bad actors spreading lies; these are people who believe false claims because they are not so comfortable navigating complex medical findings regularly.
“Low health literacy is the real pandemic,” she said. “As healthcare providers, we have a duty to serve the information in a tasteful way, and it’s easy to understand, so people do not use incorrect information because they cannot digest the correct data.”
When the Texas government, Greg Abbott, lifted the state’s mask mandate this month, led by many scientists, nurse Guillermo Carnegie called the decision a ‘spit in the face’.
“I was disgusted,” said Carnegie, 34, of Temple, Texas. “This governor and different people act like, ‘Oh, we’re proud of our frontline workers, we support them. ‘But then they do something like that and it burdens the medical field tremendously. ”
Brian Southwell, who started a program at Duke University School of Medicine to train medical professionals on how to talk to misinformed patients, says providers should view the patient they trust as an opportunity.
“The patient trusts you enough to gather the information from you,” Southwell said. “And that’s a good thing, even if you do not agree with it.”
He said medical workers should resist going into the “academic argument mode” and instead find out why patients hold certain beliefs – and whether they might be open to other ideas.
According to Dr. Seema Yasmin, a physician, journalist and professor at Stanford University who studies medical misinformation, it is essential to build trust.
“Put down your pen, put down your notebook and listen,” Yasmin said.
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Associated Press Writer John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this report.
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More AP coverage of the first year of the pandemic: Pandemic: one year