First Responders at Risk During the Pandemic

By Nick Fantasia

JRN100 Stonehill News Staff Writer

First responders are on the frontlines fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, often putting themselves at personal risk and working without the best protective equipment to protect themselves or their patients.

EMT Gabrielle Fantasia from Bridgewater comes home from work after each shift and immediately puts her clothes on a sanitize wash cycle and showers immediately to prevent her family from being infected.

“It’s not ‘if’ I get infected, it’s ‘when’,” Fantasia said. She worries about passing the virus on to her family. She lives with her eight-year-old brother, two adult siblings, parents, and her 80-year-old grandfather.

Fantasia has been utilizing her old college lab goggles on her shifts because they provide a better degree of protection than the ones that her employer has supplied her. The masks they received initially did not properly protect their eyes and face because they did not go all the way around their eyes.

COVID-19 is a highly contagious respiratory disease that can lead to death. Under government health orders or advisories most citizens are staying home to stop the spread of the disease, which spreads by any contact with an infected person either by touch or by breath.

First responders such as EMTs do not have the luxury of staying at home and out of the virus’s way.

So far, as of the end of April, more than a million have been infected and more than 50,000 have died from the pandemic, according to the New York Times tracking database.

“We receive multiple COVID calls a day, some requiring us to be in a suit that protects our whole body,” Fantasia said.

The problem isn’t that her employer is choosing not to give her the necessary equipment, she said. The problem is that they don’t have enough of this equipment for everyone on the staff, leaving first responders vulnerable.

Critics of the federal government have charged that it has not done enough to bolster the supply chains and get necessary PPE to workers on the frontlines such as Fantasia.

She said the federal government seemed unprepared to face the virus and did not have enough emergency PPE on hand, leaving states, agencies, and first responders scrambling to get equipment, especially the N95 masks.

According to the FDA, “N95 respirators and surgical masks (face masks) are examples of personal protective equipment that are used to protect the wearer from airborne particles and from liquid contaminating the face.”

The n95 masks are the most effective masks in use at this point in time, filtering about 95% of air particles. The common surgical mask is loose-fitting, has leakage issues, and does not provide a reliable level of protection. The masks that people are being asked to wear when they go out provide little to no protection, so some people have made masks out of bandanas and shirts when they couldn't buy any. 

Currently there is a shortage of masks and gloves and a lot of other protective equipment across our country. States, organizations and individuals have been left to try and fill the void on their own. Some organizations like the New England Patriots flew one million n95 masks into the United States to help bring the protective gear to healthcare workers in the Northeast.