Just as the coronavirus is about to hit its expected peak this month, Ria Rahman is preparing to head into the fray to battle the deadly outbreak in New York City.
The 27 year old is a registered nurse at the Maimonides Medical Center emergency department in Brooklyn and was the subject of a HuffPost article.
Just as the enormity of the coronavirus impact on New York City’s medical system was becoming obvious, Rahman became ill and learned that she had contracted COVID-19. She self-quarantined herself on March 20 and believes she has recovered sufficiently enough to return to “war zone,” as she calls it.
New York City earned the dubious title as the United States’ epicenter of the virus that has been sweeping throughout the world. In New York state, over 4,700 people have died of COVID-19 and more than 130,000 cases of the disease have been confirmed. Those numbers will most likely be obsolete by the time you read this article.
Rahman has described the scenes at her local hospital as chaotic. As a front-line health care provider and former coronavirus patient, she told HuffPost she’s frustrated by the “inadequacy of the government” and by individuals who are still not heeding to calls to stay home.
“Fortunately, I was able to survive this and I was able to be OK. Unfortunately, I know many nurses and colleagues that happened to not be doing as well,” she tells HuffPost. “It’s just becoming more of a war zone.”
As an American of Bangladeshi descent and the only Bangla-speaking medical professional in the emergency department in her hospital, Rahman said she is frequently called upon to translate for patients who would otherwise go unnoticed.
Hospitals in Brooklyn — a borough that’s home to at least 200 different languages and a population that’s nearly 40% foreign-born — require personnel that are as diverse as the community it serves. That need has been emphasized during the outbreak, Rahman said.
“We’re seeing immigrants that don’t even speak an ounce of English dying alone in hospitals,” she said.
If the medical experts are correct, the worse is yet to come.
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