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As COVID Cases Decline, NYC Health Care Workers Organize "White Coats For Black Lives" Protests
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Jun 7, 2020
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Caroline Lewis / Gothamist
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Jun 7, 2020
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Stanley Morin, a registered nurse who serves as one of the managers of a coronavirus unit at Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side, is just now coming out of crisis mode. The 29-year-old has moved back in with his parents and siblings after temporarily living in a hotel room provided by the city during the peak of the crisis and says he is seeing far fewer coronavirus patients than he was just a few weeks ago.
Even though Morin says the city still has “a long way to go” to fully beat the pandemic and he is somewhat worried about protests causing another uptick in cases, he decided to join fellow clinicians in a march of “White Coats for Black Lives” from Central Park’s East Meadow down Fifth Avenue to Columbus Circle on Saturday.
“We want to come out to show support for the same community that showed support for us not too long ago as we were on the front lines of the COVID crisis,” said Morin, adding that he thought it was particularly important for him to be visible as a black, male nurse.
This was the first march Morin had attended since demonstrations began a week ago and he said he was encouraged that it looked very different from the violent--and potentially COVID-spreading--clashes between police and protesters he’d seen on TV.
“Everyone is wearing a mask,” he observed. “They may not be as socially distanced as we would like them to be but everyone is doing their part to minimize the spread. As a health care worker that makes me happier than ever.”
Morin is one of many health care workers who have come out to demonstrations in recent days, often in groups identifying themselves with scrubs or white coats, even as public health experts say they’re bracing themselves for the possibility that protests will contribute to another spike in coronavirus cases.
Health care workers at the demonstrations have sought to highlight the link between racism in policing and systemic racism in the health system and society more broadly, which health experts say has contributed to people of color being disproportionately impacted by coronavirus.
Many of those marching Saturday were young employees of major hospital systems in the city, which are still reeling from the financial impact of coronavirus as they begin to bring back some of their regular services that were interrupted by the pandemic. Still, demonstrators said leadership has been supportive of the protests and their participation. The six major hospital systems in the city--NYU Langone Health, Mount Sinai Health System, NewYork-Presbyterian, NYC Health + Hospitals, Northwell Health, and Montefiore Health System--have all posted publicly in support of the demonstrations, in some cases tweeting with the hashtag #whitecoatsforblacklives.
“I think the leadership at Mount Sinai has been fantastic,” said Greg Baldwin, an anesthesiology resident at the health system who attended Saturday’s march. “Sinai has come out with hospital-wide statements about creating an inclusive community. At the department level, we have also gotten emails supporting our right to protest while telling us to be as safe as possible by wearing PPE.”
As a first-year resident, Baldwin was abruptly shifted from working on regular surgeries to working on COVID-19 units during the peak of the crisis. He said for a while he was working “seven-days-on, seven-days-off,” a grueling schedule that was put in place to help minimize spread of the virus. “For two months straight, every single patient I saw had COVID,” he said.
Baldwin said he believes the fact that health care providers are willing to march in the midst of a pandemic “speaks to the power of the movement.”
Like all of the health care providers who spoke to Gothamist at the march, Baldwin said he was there not just to protest racist policing but also to protest the fact that people’s health outcomes are frequently linked to their race and where they live in the city.
“We work at the southern end of East Harlem,” Baldwin said. “The vast majority of patients who come from there have little to no access to primary care, so they present much later [in the course of a disease] than patients who come from south of the hospital, who are more affluent and more white.”
Solange Bayard, a resident at NewYork-Presbyterian, said she moves between the health system’s Weill Cornell campus on the Upper East Side and its campus in Jamaica, Queens. She said she sees not only a disparity in patients’ access to care in the two neighborhoods, but also a disparity in the resources of the two hospital campuses.
“Especially during COVID, we’ve seen that access to care, access to medications, access to even equipment like ventilators--simple things like that that were a main-stay at Cornell, just a couple of miles away, were very disparate [in Jamaica],” Bayard said. “It was very difficult to see as residents but I can only imagine what it’s like for people living there.”
Bayard marched with her sister, Micaela, a rheumatologist at Mount Sinai, who said, “As a health care provider, everyday your job is protesting health care disparities.”
“Is it the best timing? No,” Sarah Sarcona, an anesthesiology fellow at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, said of the current movement. “But there’s nothing we can do about that. Systemic racism is a pandemic. We have a responsibility as physicians to come out.”
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COVID-19
coronavirus
2020 protests
Caroline Lewis
Caroline Lewis is on the health care beat for WNYC and Gothamist. She has covered COVID, a nurses' strike, the overdose crisis and New York’s marijuana legalization effort, and spent a year investigating patients' medical bills. She always wants to hear about how everyday New Yorkers experience the health system. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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