LONDON: A viral video of a nurse which suggested she had to quit her job due to inadequate protection while treating coronavirus patients has been called “fraudulent.”
CBS News tweeted the video on April 5 with the caption: “In tears, a nurse says she quit her job after she was asked to work in a coronavirus ICU without a face mask.”
The video was also shared by US presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders.
The clip, posted on the nurse’s Instagram page on March 31, shows her crying shortly after she said she had quit her position at an unnamed hospital in the Chicago area because she had been assigned to a COVID-19 patient and was not allowed to wear her N95 mask outside of the unit.
“I quit my job today,” the woman who uses the social media handle Imaris said. “I went into work and I was assigned to a COVID patient on an ICU unit that has been converted to a designated COVID unit. None of the nurses are wearing masks, not even surgical masks, in the hallways when they’re giving reports to each other.
“Nurses are not being protected,” she said.
“I had my own N95 mask. I told my manager, ‘I understand we’re short on supplies, but let me protect myself. Let me feel safe’,” she added.
However, Jordan Schachtel, the national security correspondent for Conservative Review, started a thread on Twitter on Monday questioned the veracity of the video’s claims and called the nurse a “fraud.”
He said the nurse began to backtrack on her story soon after Sanders shared the video.
Health care workers in the unit were actually assigned a N95 mask per one patient’s room, the nurse clarified in a tweet to the senator, which was not included in the video shared by CBS News.
“We were each assigned 1 N95 per 1 COVID patient’s room but was not allowed to wear it outside of the room, wear our own N95 mask around the Nurses station or Halls, which I came prepared with,” a tweet appearing to be from the same nurse reads.
Schachtel said the nurse had said she was “not allowed” to wear masks around anyone, even COVID patients.
“Bottom line: Hospital did have adequate supply of PPE & masks & was taking proper precautions, while making prudent decision not to blow through supplies. She shows up, 1st day on job, wants to break protocol & do her own thing. They say no. She quits & goes full crisis actor,” he tweeted.
He added that the nurse failed to disclose her career history after finding Facebook and Twitter posts from March 26 from a woman who appears to match the nurse in the video, which claim she had been off work for two weeks and would be returning to work in four days, indicating she left her position on her first day back on the job.
Schatchel pointed out the woman was also attempting to become an Instagram model.
“So she had been on the job for a day or two, after taking a year off to pursue something resembling an Instagram model career, and she ‘quit’ because of the conditions. Deliberate misrepresentation of her career means you cannot take her other statements at face value,” Schachtel said.
The nurse admitted in a post written a day before her first day back at work that she suffered from anxiety and bi-polar depression and noted that she was “feeling a heavy toll” by going to work in the ICU after a break from nursing.
