'Toxic Individualism': Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns

In my local community FB group any mention of the fact that people are dying is met with laugh reacts and derisive remarks. Mention masks? Same reaction. Mention that maybe junior will be okay without Little League this year? Unthinkable. Praise is heaped onto places that allow things like unmasked photos with Santa or crowded hay rides so that people can go "enjoy normalcy". They are quick to bully anyone who ventures that there really ISN'T a normal right now. Healthcare workers and members of the community are pleading with these people to just take reasonable precautions but they won't hear none of it. Even as other posts mention family members lost to Covid or that someone needs food delivered because they are too exhausted to cook from Covid. SMH

I wouldn't blame healthcare workers for leaving in the face of the outright hostility some of these people display.

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Rich

It's not just in the rural areas. Our good friend is a neurological nurse and he worked hard to get his master's degree in that field. He's been sent to NYC during their crisis back in April and May and upon return has remained on the COVID floor at one of our local hospitals. He's seriously looking at getting into another job, outside the medical field. The week of Thanksgiving he came over to talk with us. Patients are telling the nurses they aren't being treated for the proper diagnosis because they don't have COVID, it's a hoax, Trump said the numbers are going down and the testing is all wrong, no need to call their family because they aren't dying, etc. They keep up the vective until they are put on a ventilator. Then they are scared to death because it finally sinks in. He leaves the hospital to see people refuse to wear masks, refuse to distance, refuse to believe this is real. The deaths are piling up as he had six patients die in a matter of two days, not to mention all the ones prior to that. And he asks my husband, the combat vet, "How do you deal with all the death?" We're headed for a mass health care PTSD crisis and no one is even prepared for that yet. SIGH!