The immigrant fitness staff keeps the US fitness care formula afloat.
Last Updated: Game Aug 27, 2020 00. 38 BST
Dr. Reza Chowdhury did not rate copayments when his patients were in cash shortages. He gave them his phone number and answered his medical questions throughout the day. Once, when Chowdhury’s daughter, Nikita Rahman, engaged in a verbal conversation with a New York taxi driver, it turned out she was from Bangladesh and knew her father: “Dr. Reza?He’s my doctor, he’s the most productive doctor!”she remembers.
A resident physician practicing in the Bronx, Chowdhury had studied medicine in his local Bangladesh before immigrating to the United States 30 years ago. He left his circle of relatives at home while he settled in and worked as a tutor, waiter, and security guard while he trained in the United States.
When Covid arrived in New York City, Rahman begged his father, who had had a kidney transplant and was immunosuppressed, to stay home. But he continued painting until mid-March when he developed symptoms. He died on April 9.
America relies on an immigrant workforce, from doctors and nurses to nursing assistants, to keep its physical care formula afloat. And now, immigrant fitness staff are dying at the rate of the pandemic. Lost on the Frontline, a joint Guardian and KHN project, revealed that nearly a third of the healthcare personnel found to have died from Covid-19 were born outdoors in the United States. Yet immigrants make up only 14% of the US population and 18% of its physical attention force.
Chowdhury was part of a non-profit network of fitness service providers in New York called Somos, which was devastated by the pandemic. Founded to provide “culturally competent care” to low-income New Yorkers, at most of its 2,500 doctors and nurses are immigrants, as its patients come from Bangladesh, the Dominican Republic and Egypt among others. In the first months of the pandemic, Somos reported that 12 of its doctors and nurse practitioners had died from Covid-19.
“It is our patients who do the dishes, prepare the food, take the bus, drive taxis,” said Dr. Ramon Tallaj, president and co-founder of Somos. “And we threaten our lives for our patients. ” Chowdhury practiced in a working-class segment of the Bronx, a district heavily affected by the coronavirus.
Most of Somos’ professionals are the number one care providers: a circle of medical family members, pediatricians, nurse practitioners. “We are community doctors,” Tallaj said. We work with other deficient people in poor communities and speak the same languages as our patients,” our doctors are on Park Avenue. “
He claimed that at the beginning of the pandemic, public care and investment went to hospitals and emergency care, while he and his colleagues pooled resources to purchase non-public protective devices and establish checkpoints in the neighborhood.
It turns out that this early exposure of patients, before they are ill enough to go to the emergency room, may have made those staff more vulnerable: A recent survey found that number one care providers “can be more likely to see patients in an early, mild or asymptomatic but still contagious stage, SARS-CoV-2, with little or no non-public protective equipment. “
The family doctor Ydelfonso Decoo, 70 years old, the community doctor par excellence. Since his practice in Washington Heights, Upper Manhattan, he has noticed generations of patients walk through his doors. The patients and their families, many immigrants from the Dominican Republic, like him, stopped to greet him when they saw him on the street.
“He enjoyed his network and took the time to pay attention to them,” said Dorka Cáceres, his assistant for 20 years. Decoo saw patients until the end of March when he developed symptoms.
Dr. Ashraf Metwally was an Egyptian physician from the Brooklyn family circle, and Dalia Ibrahim, a friend from the family circle, described it as a “staple food” in the local Arab community. A cancer survivor who provided his emergency at the beginning of the pandemic. , he “helped people. ” It’s just who he was, “Ibrahim wrote.
“These contractors were like firefighters,” said Liz Webb, Vice President of Human Resources at Somos. “They went to their communities, spoke in their language, and made sure [people] didn’t care about their immigration status” when they were going to get tested,” he said.
To address the loss of their colleagues and uncertainty about the future, Somos’ doctors organized an evening prayer organization in Zoom and began lending it to Covid’s new access points: this summer, they sent fitness staff to Georgia and Florida to volunteer at clinics and hospitals.
Chowdhury’s family circle has spent the last few months learning what he meant to his patients – they were beaten through grief and from other people around the world who had sought his attention or recommendation at one time or another. memorial online, they struggled to find a platform that could accommodate anyone who wanted to pay tribute, Chowdhury’s daughter said.
“Zooming allows you to succeed in up to two hundred users, so we used [the service] that allowed 500, and we were even at full capacity,” he said.