Coronavirus: front-line workers plead with Quebecers to better follow public health measures

The very slight reprieve seen in the past several days from Quebec’s months-long upward COVID-19 curve has yet to be felt in the province’s hospitals. Now, exhausted front-line health-care workers are pleading with the public to be more vigilant about following public health rules to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus.

It’s a message echoed by the government in its latest pandemic-related public service announcement.

The 30-second television spot highlights examples of Quebecers “bending the rules” and being hospitalized after contracting COVID-19, and ends with the stern message: “We have to follow all the rules, all the time, no exceptions.”

Mary-Lou Foley, a nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital, expressed a similar level of frustration in an interview.

“It’s very frustrating, it’s maddening,” she said of Quebecers skirting the rules at home or flying to sunny vacations to avoid them entirely abroad. “You know, we’re doing our part to keep people safe and we see people just turning around and exercising their right to do nothing at all.”

Health-care workers can and will do their best to treat you if you end up in hospital, Foley said, but it’s up to each and every one of us to make every effort to not get sick in the first place.

“Front-line workers can only do so much,” she said. “By the time we see you, you’re already ill.”

Foley told Global News there was simply no more room at St. Mary’s.

“This morning when I looked at the numbers, we were full,” she confirmed.

The situation is less dire at the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC), but not by much: after a calmer week than the one that came before, the hospital’s critical care director Dr. Peter Goldberg said new COVID-19 admissions have risen in the past 24 hours.

In a Zoom interview with Global News, he added that one of the biggest challenges health-care workers face now compared to the first wave is the ongoing effort to continue to provide as much care as possible to patients with other, non-COVID-19 ailments.

“We have approximately 40 per cent of our patients have COVID, and 60 per cent do not. And so we’re trying to keep our surgical services going,” he said.

The more people in Quebec need to be hospitalized with COVID-19, the more difficult it becomes to treat people sick with something else.

Quebec’s hospitals are not, at the moment, anywhere near the catastrophic situation that has befallen hospitals in southern California, where oxygen supplies have been depleted. However, Royal Victoria Hospital respiratory therapist Michael Zeeman said if it did happen here, it would be disastrous.

“It’s a valid worry,” he said. “I mean, sometimes these patients need very, very high amounts of oxygen.”

The best way to ensure our hospitals aren’t faced with a similar situation, Zeeman and the others say, is to do as the government’s PSA says: follow all the rules, all the time, no exceptions.