How Trump Failed Michigan: PPE and Ventilator Shortages, Nurses Infected

LANSING — As Donald Trump travels to Michigan in a desperate attempt to take a victory lap over his inadequate COVID-19 response, the Michigan Democratic Party is highlighting the ways Trump has failed Michiganders during this public health crisis.

After months of failing to prepare and downplaying the threat, Donald Trump failed to get Michigan’s frontline health care workers and patients the PPE and ventilators they need as cases surged throughout the state. Here are the top stories on Donald Trump’s PPE failures:

Detroit News 

Nurses in Metro Detroit are using social media to describe the fight against coronavirus. The dispatches aren’t pretty. Used medical masks. Medicine shortages. No ventilators available. Looming decisions about which patients will live and which will die. “Do you think that that sounds safe?” nurse Mary Macdonald said during a video on Instagram. “Because we are completely out of resources.

Detroit Free Press

Yet Michigan nurses say they’re on the front lines, fighting the global pandemic without the proper protective gear like masks, gowns and face shields to keep themselves from getting sick, bringing the disease home to their families and potentially spreading it to other patients… McLaren nurses say they are given one mask to wear for an entire 12-hour shift, and they’re told to wear that same mask when they go room-to-room — whether they’re treating COVID-19 patients or patients who don’t have the virus. That, they say, puts the patients who don’t have coronavirus at risk for getting the infection.

MLive

As of Monday, April 6, 110 employees out of 728 who have been tested, have COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus… The statistics come as hospitals in the Detroit-area, which has been hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak, said thousands of employees have been sickened. At least 2,200 employees of the Henry Ford Health System and Beaumont Health have either tested positive or are experiencing symptoms of the infection, according to multiple news reports.

“While cases surged and COVID-19 spread throughout Michigan, Donald Trump called the disease a Democratic hoax, downplayed the threat, and put Michigan healthcare workers in danger,” said Michigan Democratic Party spokesman Christian Slater. “Donald Trump’s COVID-19 response has failed Michiganders and empty promises and sham campaign rallies can’t change that fact.”

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