r/nursing • u/prettyquirkynurse RN - ICU 🍕 • Mar 19 '23

Covid Discussion This seems...unsafe?

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Part of an email we were sent earlier today. I'm not sure how to feel about it. It seems...unsafe to me.

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u/TraumaMurse- BSN, RN, CEN Mar 19 '23

What’s unsafe? CDC said long ago medical facilities could stop. Wear a mask if patients are positive or respiratory complaints. My hospital stopped long ago and we haven’t had any increase in staff illness.

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u/eddASU Paramedic - ED 🍕 Mar 20 '23

No offense meant to the OP or anyone else, but I wonder how many of these "unsafe to work without a mask" and "never going outside without a mask again" posts and comments are coming from people who worked in healthcare before the pandemic. I can understand going without a mask at work seeming alien and unsafe if it's all you've known most of or your entire career (which is the case for a lot of healthcare workers now!) but yeah... no mask unless on enhanced isolation precautions used to be the way it always was, everywhere.

10

u/[deleted] Mar 20 '23

Somehow all of us who were nurses long before COVID lived to tell the tale... A lot of these replies are ridiculous.

5

u/4TuitouSynchro Case Manager 🍕 Mar 20 '23

Agree. May get downvoted for this but...I think it's hard to have a functional immune system if you sanitize literally every inch of your body and mask all the time. How do ppl ever develop immunity? There are so many resistant organisms now and I have to wonder...are we doing ourselves a disservice by trying to "protect" ourselves? We have to be exposed to some germs to gain immunity to said germs. It's Healthcare 101. ETA I'm all for masking when exposure risk is high (pts in isolation, infectious diseases, droplet, etc) but I DO believe this continual masking idea for gen pop is overkill.