For Pamella Brown-Richardson, a nurse practitioner in New York, the fever and cough came in mid-March. Soon after, her fever worsened, and she began experiencing shortness of breath and body aches — telltale symptoms of the novel coronavirus. By early April, Brown-Richardson was in the emergency room with double-lobe pneumonia caused by covid-19.
As Brown-Richardson tells it, there is probably only one place where she could have been exposed to the virus: the primary care clinic in the Bronx, where she says she spent days caring for people suffering from covid-19 symptoms with just a flimsy surgical mask as protection.
Brown-Richardson is one of more than a dozen nurses in New York, the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak, who detailed their experiences on the front lines in affidavits corroborating three lawsuits filed Monday against the state health department and two area hospitals. The complaints, which were lodged by New York’s largest nurses union, allege that inadequate protective equipment, among other failures, contributed to “compromising the health and safety of the nurses,” according to a news release from the union. Continue reading.