These 10 Inland Empire medical workers are on front lines of coronavirus fight – The Press-Enterprise

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At Inland Empire hospitals, the struggle against the novel coronavirus pandemic is up close and personal. Doctors, nurses, medical assistants, cleaning staff, engineers retrofitting facilities to hold the virus in patients’ rooms and more are working to stop a disease that’s already killed more than 74,000 people in the United States. As the coronavirus pandemic began in the United States, nurse Lauren Baca guessed her floor of Hemet Global Medical Center would end up being the COVID-19 quarantine floor. Hospital workers spent a day converting the floor. Each room got its own antechamber to allow staff to put on or remove protective gear while treating COVID-19 patients. And the new ventilation system is loud. “We do have to sort of yell at the patients so they can hear at us and they have to yell at us back,” said Baca, 33. Like many in her field, the San Jacinto resident hopes the public stays the course with social distancing and other measures to slow the coronavirus’s spread. “I know it sucks. Believe me, I’m one of these people who would love to go and get a haircut. I’m about to cut it off myself,” Baca said. “In New York, they literally can’t give people the care they want to, because they’re so overwhelmed. I don’t want us to get to that point.” Menifee resident Dr. John Carvalho avoids leaving his house, other than going to work on the COVID-19 quarantine floor at Hemet Global Medical Center. “We’ve all had to adapt to being a thousand times more conscious about what kind of environment we’re in, what condition our gowns are in, how we’re taking them on and off,” said Carvalho, 34, one of the resident physicians on the floor. “It almost becomes a caricature of how we were trained.” He wears N95 respirator masks, along with goggles, a plastic face shield, a surgical cap and waterproof shoes. Despite all that, Carvalho limits how much time he spends in public, even when getting groceries or meals. “I can’t ever know fully how much I would be exposing other people,” he said. “We try to make one trip a week or less, order things ahead of time to just pick up or just get it delivered.”

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Negative Pressure Rooms Help Combat Coronavirus – Spectrum News One

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Serena Barrera is a registered nurse at KPC Health Orange County Global Medical Center, which is a 282-bed hospital in Santa Ana. KPC nurses have been treating COVID-19 cases since early March, and she says that while the threat of the virus is invisible, the effects are anything but. “You know, you go out and you see people who don’t have a mask or don’t take it seriously. They think it’s a joke because they don’t understand. But it’s serious,” says Barrera. The hospital is treating its COVID-19 patients in negative pressure rooms, which act as a giant vacuum. Each of these environmental containment units maintains a negative pressure by sending more air out than the room takes in. Kyle Houraney is the Orange County Operational Area Incident Commander for KPC Health, which spent millions to roll out assets. The hospital has over 60 COVID-19 beds and plans to double that number. With the hospital now performing electives surgeries again, and Orange County having one of the highest numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases in the state, it’s essential for this hospital, that has served the community since 1902, to stay ready. “The sense is, the COVID patients, the increase that we’re seeing in Orange County, by no means are we out of the woods yet. That’s where we’re at in our command center. So right now just because we have set-up this equipment – we’re still preparing for the worst,” Houraney says. The room itself is sealed off. Anyone going in or out like Barrera wears a full set of personal protective equipment and enters in a warm zone before walking into the COVID-19 hot zone. She is one of nearly three million registered nurses in the United States. But it’s their humanity that can’t be forgotten their choice to put patients before family. “That part’s stressful for everybody. Because you don’t want to give it to your family. Everybody’s worried about catching it on the outside, but they don’t think about all the workers that are here, all the nurses that are here all day long,” Barrera says.

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