[D66] Nurse suicides rise in Europe amid stress of COVID-19 pandemic

[Antid Oto]

wsws.org:

“We cannot abandon the nurses”
Nurse suicides rise in Europe amid stress of COVID-19 pandemic
By Allison Smith
31 March 2020

Last week, 34-year-old nurse Daniella Trezzi, who worked in the COVID-19 
intensive care ward of San Gerardo hospital at Monza, near Milan, 
learned that she had been infected with the disease. Distraught at the 
idea that she could have spread the coronavirus to others before she 
learned that she carried the disease, and facing the relentless working 
conditions at a hospital in the epicenter of the pandemic in Europe, 
Trezzi tragically committed suicide.

The National Federation of Italian Nurses (FNOPI) said in a brief 
statement about her death that Ms. Trezzi and many nurses treating 
quarantined patients showing COVID-19 symptoms feel “heavy stress for 
fear of having infected others.” The Federation noted the “pain and 
dismay” of its members “at the news of her death.”

Trezzi had studied at the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca and 
lived with her dog in Brugherio. She leaves behind a brother and many 
friends and colleagues. Her Facebook page, which was still accessible 
yesterday, made clear her love of nature and travel and her dedication 
to her chosen profession.

In the wake of Trezzi’s suicide, the FNOPI implored: “Each of us has 
chosen this profession for good and, unfortunately, also for bad: we are 
nurses. And nurses, all nurses, never leave anyone alone, even at 
risk—and this is evident—of their own lives. But that’s enough: we must 
not, we cannot, abandon the nurses.”

This tragedy points to the terrible human cost not only of the COVID-19 
pandemic, but of decades of social austerity policies that have left 
hospitals across Europe understaffed, overworked and without life-saving 
protection equipment like masks to shield medical staff from the contagion.

Now, amid the greatest global pandemic since the Spanish flu of 
1918–1919, millions of nurses and medical professionals internationally 
are working around the clock with little or no protective gear. Across 
Europe tens of thousands of medical staff have contracted the disease, 
and health workers represent a staggering one in eight of Spain’s now 
85,195 COVID-19 cases. They share images of exhausted colleagues, as 
hospitals buckle under the stress of treating thousands of COVID-19 
intensive care patients each day.

Medical staff undergo unbearable stress, helplessly watching COVID-19 
patients die alone. Dr. Francesca Cortellaro, head of the emergency room 
of the Borromeo hospital, told Euronews: “Do you see the emergency room? 
COVID-19 patients enter alone, no relatives can attend, and when they 
are about to leave they sense it. They are lucid, they do not go to 
narcolepsy.”

The stress is intensified by the contradictory messages and policies 
from European governments, which repeatedly made false comparisons of 
COVID-19 to seasonal flu to downplay the illness and try to force 
workers back to work to boost corporate profits in the middle of the 
pandemic.

Monica Trombetta, a nurse working in Como, near Monza, told the press: 
“We’re very tired and afraid. Government decrees change every day. 
Personnel does not have clear guidelines for dealing with this new virus 
and feel a little abandoned—not by our hospital, but it’s just as a 
general feeling. Nurses are afraid to go home and potentially infect 
their relatives.”

Nurses—who by the very nature of their job, spend the most time with 
patients—are particularly vulnerable to suicidal feelings. Nurse 
suicides have become a global epidemic, with US female and male nurses 
committing suicide at rates of 11.97 and 39.8 per 100,000 respectively 
last year, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. In their extremely 
high-pressure environment, demands for optimal performance are a 
decisive factor in intensifying feelings of distress and depression.

In Britain, a young nurse in her 20s working at King’s College Hospital 
in London took her own life while treating COVID-19 patients last week. 
Her colleagues found her unresponsive in her ward, and doctors were 
unable to resuscitate her. Her next of kin have been notified, but the 
hospital did not release her identity.

Several British hospital trusts are reporting that up to 50 percent of 
their medical staff are at home, sick with COVID-19, leaving remaining 
staff wondering who will look after them and the massive daily influx of 
COVID-19 patients if they too fall ill with the virus.

Having infected hundreds of thousands of people, COVID-19 is ravaging 
hospitals in all of Europe. This exposes the malignant neglect of 
European officials for the fate of the broad mass of working people. 
Chancellor Angela Merkel called for Germans to accept that 70 to 80 
percent of the population would get sick, and British officials calling 
for Britons to develop “herd immunity” by infecting almost the entire 
population with coronavirus. Based on these policies, they pressed for 
workers to continue working to churn out profits for big corporations.

Such proposals, which entail hundreds of millions catching COVID-19, 
would provoke a crisis hundreds or thousands of times more severe than 
the horrors already being visited on the population and health staff of 
northern Italy and other hard-hit regions. That such proposals are 
advanced by leading European governments make clear the political and 
moral degeneracy of the existing social system, and the callous 
indifference of the ruling class to the human tragedies that are unfolding.

Also last week in Italy, a 49-year-old nurse who worked in the COVID-19 
ward of Jesolo hospital committed suicide, throwing herself into the 
Piave river in Cortellazzo, in the region of Venice.

The nurse, whose initials are S.L., had courageously volunteered to work 
with coronavirus patients and helped convert the Jesolo hospital into a 
COVID-19-only ward. S.L. lived alone and was at home for two days with 
fever, awaiting the results of a COVID-19 test, when she took her own life.

Paying his respects to S.L., her hospital director said: “She was a 
person dedicated to work, an irreplaceable resource for colleagues and 
for this health authority. Not by chance, as soon as we heard the news 
of her disappearance, colleagues at the hospital in Jesolo, who are busy 
these days on the coronavirus front, were deeply affected and shaken by 
the event. I express my deepest condolences and closeness to the family 
of ‘our nurse’ S.L.”

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