Were I in charge of a hospital, admission for Covid-19 treatment

[Ms. Toad]

93. I agree as to COVID 19 - and I've been working since March to convince people to wear masks

direct conversations, sharing research, making masks, not going out of the house since March without a mask, reporting every single business in which I see unmasked customers to the health department, and now to the BWC (now in charge of enforcement), pleading with family members not to have thanksgiving outside of the family, wearing a mask inside my home when it became clear my family members were not being as safe as they should be (I've been wearing a mask 24/7 - in my home, aside from eating for a week and a half.)

That said, for the first decade HIV/AIDS, health workers were at risk from their patients. It was lower risk, but it was not zero risk. Health care work is sometimes bloody. Needle sticks happen - my SIL, in the same era, was infected with Hep C from a needle stick - it could just as easily have been HIV. Scalpels sometimes slice through gloves and fingers. Simultaneously, some HIV/AIDs patients were hiding their infections because of the stigma associated with the disease - even from healthcare workers they knew they might expose. From a culpability viewpoint, that is equivalent to going to work with COVID 19 symptoms - or not wearing a mask when you know you have been exposed. In that same era, we actively considered asking a gay male friend of ours to be a sperm donor. We learned later that he was already HIV+ at the time. That he hadn't disclosed his status to friends who were close enough to consider him as a sperm donor speaks volumes to the need many felt to conceal their HIV status - which did put health care workers (and potentially sex partners/family members at risk).

So, although ease of transmission is different - there is some similarity between those with HIV/AIDS who exposed others rather than disclosing and individuals who have not been wearing masks - resulting in exposing HCW.

My sole purpose in responding to the inaccurate post was to point out that the behavior of HIV/AIDS patients (in having unprotected sex and failing to disclose status in the era before universal precautions) sometimes put HCW at risk in the same way (if not severity of risk) that people currently not wearing masks does now.

Definitely, the level of risk is vastly different - but that's only because HIV/AIDS is much harder to transmit from person to person, not because faling to use barrier protection when engaging in sex (once the transmission route was known) is somehow less culpable behavior than not using a barrier to protect onesself from airborne transmission of COVID 19. In fact, I've been using the analogy of sexual interactions to try to make the point to my family of how their out-of-family social interactions put me at risk - that they are not merely taking the risk for themselves, but that I am - in effect - interacting without a mask with everyone they interact with without a mask. Hence, my decision to wear a mask at home 24/7.

And - like HIV/AIDS resulted in universal precautions being implemented to protect HCW (and their subsequent patients) from HIV/AIDS - I expect we will see similar universal precautions implemented to protect HCW from COVID 19 as we learn more about how it is transmitted..