Sandra Younan, a Los Angeles emergency room nurse, spent the past year juggling long hours as she watched many patients struggle with the coronavirus and some died.
Then there were the patients who claimed the virus was fake or coughed in her face, ignoring the mask rules. A man stormed out of the hospital after a positive COVID-19 test and refused to believe it was correct.
“You have patients who are literally dying, and then you have patients who are denying the disease,” she said. “You try to teach and you try to teach, but then you just hit a wall.”
False claims about the virus, masks and vaccines have exploded since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic a year ago. Journalists, public health officials and technology companies have tried to push back against the untruths, but much of the job of correcting misinformation has fallen to the world’s first-line medical workers.
In Germany, a video clip of a nurse using an empty syringe while performing vaccinations, traveled widely online as alleged evidence that COVID-19 is fake. Doctors in Afghanistan reported patients telling them that COVID-19 was created by the US and China to reduce the world’s population. In Boliviamedical workers had to take care of five people who had ingested a toxic bleach that was falsely touted as a COVID-19 cure.
Younan, 27, says her friends always described her as the “coldest person ever,” but now she’s dealing with crushing anxiety.
“My life is a nurse, so I don’t care if you’re really sick, you have to throw up about me whatever,” Younan said. ‘But if you know what you’re doing is wrong, and I repeatedly ask you to please wear your mask to protect me, and you still don’t, it’s like you don’t respect anyone but yourself. And that’s why this virus spreads. You just lose hope. “
Stationed at a Seattle hospital, Emily Scott, 36, has worked on medical missions around the world and helped care for America’s first COVID-19 patient last year. She was selected for her work experience in Sierra Leone during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak.
While many Americans were terrified of Ebola – a disease nowhere near as contagious as the coronavirus and of little threat in the U.S. – they are nowhere near fearful enough of COVID-19, she said.
Scott blames a few factors: the terrifying symptoms of Ebola, racism against Africans, and the politicization of COVID-19 by US elected officials.
“I felt so much safer in Sierra Leone during Ebola than at the start of this outbreak in the US,” Scott said, because many people disregarded social distance and masked guidelines. “Things that are facts and science have been politicized.”
EH nurse L’Erin Ogle has heard a litany of false claims about the virus while working at a hospital in the suburbs of Kansas City, Kansas. They include: the virus is no worse than the fluIt’s caused by 5G wireless towersMasks don’t help and can hurtOr, most painfully for her, the virus isn’t real, and doctors and nurses are embroiled in a massive global conspiracy to hide the truth.
“It just feels so overwhelming, and you wonder why am I doing this?” said Ogle, 40.
According to Professor Maria Brann, a health communications expert at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, nurses are often the caregivers with the most patient contact, and patients often view nurses as more accessible. This means that nurses are more likely to encounter patients who are spreading misinformation, which gives them a special opportunity to intervene.
“Nurses have always been patient advocates, but this pandemic has hit them so much more,” Brann said. “It can certainly take its toll. This isn’t necessarily what they signed up for. “
In some cases, nurses and other health professionals themselves are spreading misinformation. And many nurses say they run into untruths about the coronavirus vaccine in their own families.
For Brenda Olmos, 31, a nurse practitioner in Austin, Texas who focuses on a geriatric and Hispanic patient population, getting the vaccine was a good idea. But first she had to argue about her parents, who had heard unsubstantiated claims that the shot would cause infertility and Bell’s palsy on Spanish-language TV programs.
Olmos eventually convinced her parents to get the vaccine too, but she is concerned about the hesitation in her community.
When she recently met an elderly patient with cancerous tumors, Olmos knew it had taken years for the growths to develop. But the adult children of the man who recently got him the vaccine insisted that the two were linked.
“It just seemed too coincidental to them,” said Olmos. “I just wish they didn’t have that debt.”
Olmos said the real problem with misinformation isn’t just that bad actors are spreading lies – they’re people who believe false claims because they’re not so comfortable navigating often complex medical findings.
“Low health literacy is the real pandemic,” she said. “As healthcare providers, we have a duty to provide the information in a way that is tasty and easy to understand, so that people don’t consume misinformation because they can’t digest the real data.”
When Texas Governor Greg Abbott lifted the state’s mask mandate This month, nurse specialist Guillermo Carnegie, against the guidance of many scientists, called the decision a “spit in the face.”
“I was disgusted,” said Carnegie, 34, of Temple, Texas. “This governor and several people are acting like, ‘Oh, we are proud of our frontline workers, we support them.’ But then they do something like that, and it puts a huge strain on the medical field. “
Brian Southwell, who started a program at Duke University School of Medicine to train medical professionals to talk to ill-informed patients, said health care providers should view the patient who confides in them as an opportunity.
“That patient trusts you enough to have that information with you,” Southwell said. “And that’s a good thing, even if you don’t agree.”
He said medical providers should not go into “academic argumentation mode” and instead discover why patients have certain beliefs – and whether they might be open to other ideas.
That listening is imperative to build trust, said Dr. Seema Yasmin, a physician, journalist and professor at Stanford University who studies medical misinformation.
“Put down your pen, put down your notebook and listen,” Yasmin said.
Associated Press Writer John Leicester in Le Pecq, France, contributed to this report.
More AP coverage from the first year of the pandemic: Pandemic: One year