A South Dakota nurse has gone viral after explaining her ongoing frustrations with trying to convince COVID-19 patients they actually have the virus.
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,’” Jodi Doering told CNN. “Even after positive results come back, some people just don’t believe it.”
Doering was sitting on her couch Saturday night and was attempting to soothe herself on a night off by cuddling her dog and eating Oreo ice cream, when she felt the urge to publicly express the obstacles she’s facing at work.
“I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days,” she tweeted. “The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is … Going to ruin the USA.”
She added: “All while gasping for breath on 100% Vapotherm. They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that ‘stuff’ because they don’t have COViD because it’s not real.”
Some state officials and residents in South Dakota — a coronavirus hot spot in which a majority of voters cast ballots for President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election — have been vocal about downplaying the threat of the virus.
Gov. Kristi Noem (R) has refused to put a mask mandate in place. In response to President-elect Joe Biden’s proposed idea that there be a nationwide lockdown and mask mandate once he takes office to help quell the spread of the virus, Noem’s office told the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in a statement Friday that she has no intention of using state resources to enforce any federal COVID-19 orders.
In August, an estimated 460,000 visitors from all across the country entered the city of Sturgis, South Dakota, for the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, despite other large events being canceled due to the pandemic. By the end of the month, Sturgis attendees began testing positive for COVID-19 and by early September, a working paper from the IZA Institute of Labor Economics said the 10-day event may have led to nearly 267,000 cases across the country. Noem, however, rejected the paper’s findings, and called it “fiction.”
She also told Fox News that the four economists from three U.S. universities that researched the paper “took a snapshot in time, and they did a lot of speculation, did some back-of-the-napkin math, made up some numbers and published them.”
Yet, factors that contribute to the spread of the coronavirus are hard to ignore when Doering emphasized to CNN (above) the extent of some of her COVID-19 patients’ denial.
“People want it to be influenza, they want it to be pneumonia, we’ve even had people say, ‘I think it could be lung cancer,’” Doering told the outlet. The nurse said that when she suggests that some patients should FaceTime with their friends and family for a final conversation, they say, “‘No, because I’m doing fine.’”
She said this attitude is taking a serious toll on health care workers.
“It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends,” she tweeted Saturday. “There’s no credits that roll. You just go back and do it all over again.”