Hospitals in the region have raised distress signals to their congressional delegations about inadequate staffing as they prepare for surge capacity. The number of confirmed cases — more than 4,700 across the region on Wednesday afternoon — more than tripled over the past week alone, with 2,332 cases now in Maryland, 1,708 in Virginia and 657 in the District.
Leaders in the District, Maryland and Virginia sent a letter to President Donald Trump on March 15 requesting the national capital region be designated a priority location for a federally funded Covid-19 testing site. They’ve grown increasingly impatient at the lack of federal action. Other local needs mirror vast parts of the country. There’s a deficit in personal protective equipment, hospital beds and ventilators — and it’s hard to justify stockpiling when the machines are needed more elsewhere right now.
“We’ve got 6 million people here that are absolutely crucial to the wheels of government continuing to move, but things are not moving in a good direction,” Rep. David Trone (D-Md.) said between calls with local health care professionals. “These urban areas where the majority of our federal workers live will be hit much, much harder. We’ve got to see that coming and we’ve got to use every day, every week, to help build up the beds, ventilators, (protective equipment) and testing.”
Unions representing federal workers, attesting to abysmal conditions on the ground, are calling on the administration to immediately enact so-called continuity of operations plans across the government. Without leadership from the administration, officials said agencies have had to act on their own, with uneven levels of response. They complain there’s been no governmentwide report on how many federal employees have contracted the virus or been exposed to it, which labor groups demand.
The administration dragged its feet for weeks before issuing direct calls for agencies to maximize telework across the nation and restrict access to federal facilities, said Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 700,000 federal and D.C. government employees. Positions at airports, military hospitals, federal prisons and elsewhere require a physical presence at the job site, and Kelley’s received numerous reports from members indicating far more needs to be done to protect them and the public.
On a recent call with Department of Veterans Affairs workers, Kelley was told they were having to wear trash bags before going in to take care of patients. After, they took off the bags and handed them to another employee to use. “They’re just not providing the proper equipment,” said Kelley, who is asking the feds to come to the table to help deal with workplace safety concerns.
“You deal with a lot of anxiety when you’re working beside a person that you know is potentially infected. You deal with a lot of morale issues,” he said by phone. “This pandemic can be so devastating that at any moment it can just explode and be more and more deaths, more and more people infected, and we’re just not properly prepared to deal with it.”
Administration officials say sending federal workers home would amount to a government shutdown, depriving vulnerable Americans of critical services like Social Security checks and food inspections. They contend that issuing federal guidance while also empowering agencies to make their own decisions about their personnel is the best process.
Source: politico.com
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