Adequate Protective Equipment Urgently Required
Across Ontario thousands of hospital and long-term care workers represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) held a forceful workplace protest on Wednesday May 6 calling on the Premier to end the rationing of personal protective equipment (PPE) and to secure higher level N95 masks to better protect them. In hospitals and long term care homes CUPE front line workers in unison raised posters demanding protective gear at the same time CUPE Ontario and CUPE's Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU/CUPE) held a province-wide ZOOM press conference to make public the workers' demands.
CUPE notes that front line health care workers now account for nearly 16 per cent of the province's COVID-19 cases. "That is an infection rate four times that of China and 60 per cent higher than Italy, which sits at 10 per cent health care worker infections." Michael Hurley, president of the Ontario Council of Hospital Unions (OCHU), the hospital division of CUPE, said, "Staff on the COVID-19 front-lines soldier on each day, fighting a war against a highly infectious virus with inadequate equipment, and not enough of it. Five have died, many are falling sick and many of these casualties are completely preventable." Hurley said that Ontario's recently watered-down safety protocols and the failure to do widespread testing are contributing factors. He said research clearly shows that the lack of protective gear, like N95 masks that block aerosolized virus particles, are among the factors fueling COVID-19 infections among health care workers. "Four per cent of cases in China are health care workers. China uses airborne precautions for COVID-19. Compare that to 16 per cent of Ontario's cases where contact/droplet precautions are used. Ontario's unscientific approach to the virus and its rationing of equipment treat health care workers as cannon fodder. We ask for immediate action from the Premier." The union is calling for the GM plant in Oshawa to make the N95 mask, which GM produces at a plant in Michigan. CUPE Ontario secretary-treasurer Candace Rennick added that while front line health workers are getting COVID in large numbers, upwards of 25 per cent of health care workers who file a WSIB claim are being denied benefits. Rennick said it is so wrong, "The province must presume the COVID infection to be work-related and accept these claims." |
The
situation is unacceptable and unsustainable. The number of Ontario
health care workers infected with COVID-19 rose from 2016 on April 27
to 2892 on May 5. This is 876 more infections in just eight days, an
alarming 43.5 per cent increase. On May 13, CTV reported the number had
risen to 3,562. On May 12, a nurse who worked at a long term care home
in London died of COVID-19 -- the first registered nurse to die as a
result of the disease in Canada.
