The CDC Doesn't Care if You Get Sick and Die in The Hospital
Quote:You might've heard the CDC is about to make things even more dangerous for patients when they vote on new, lower standards for infection control this November. This decision will hurt everyone. It will hurt doctors and nurses. It will hurt seniors. It will hurt children. It will hurt young, healthy adults (who goes to the hospital when they're feeling great?) There's only one small group it will help, and that's healthcare CEOs and their bottom lines.
They also plan on officially recommending baggy surgical masks as equivalent to N95s. The latest draft of their guidelines says absolutely nothing about ventilation, UV lights, or even HEPA filters. They don't even directly acknowledge the airborne transmission of diseases.
CDC Advisory Group Under Fire for Proposed Infection Control Guidelines
Quote:The agency last revised the guidelines, "Isolation Precautions: Preventing Transmission of Infectious Agents in Healthcare Settings," in 2007, and now the group that advises the CDC on infection control practices -- the Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC) -- is drafting proposed 2024 changes for CDC approval.
"While the CDC is updating their language, they're not actually updating their precautions in ways that they should based on the science," Jane Thomason, MSPH, CIH, an industrial hygienist for National Nurses United (NNU), told MedPage Today.
At the height of the pandemic, the CDC adopted a set of guidelines including "contingency" and "crisis capacity" strategies meant to address staffing shortages, which let healthcare facilities and employers implement varying levels of COVID-19 infection precautions based on self-assessment and staffing needs, including "as a last resort," allowing healthcare personnel with active COVID infections to work anyway. The guidelines recognized the use of face masks, including surgical masks, as acceptable even in these cases.
Thomason said this gave hospitals and employers the discretion to provide only the bare minimum of protections. In some instances, she said, nurses caring for COVID-positive patients were told they weren't allowed to access existing N95s.
NNU and other public health professionals have drawn parallels between the CDC's pandemic-era protocols and the new proposed guidelines. A letter sent to CDC Director Mandy Cohen, MD, MPH, and signed by hundreds of public and occupational health experts, noted that the proposed change "allows healthcare employers undefined broad discretion in creating and implementing their infection control and prevention plans," based in part on staffing levels, patient populations, and a distinction between "pandemic-phase" and "seasonal" pathogens.
Things are going to get way harder.
