Exactly.This is ironic because there was a story last year about a transplant recipient who died because the donor's organs tested positive after the transplant. If I'm remembering it correctly, the donor was tested before passing but got a false negative. It was posted in this thread but it's so long now I have no idea how to find it.
ETA: Google is my friend.
It was actually early this year.
Michigan woman dies of COVID-19 after transplant from infected donor
A Michigan woman contracted COVID-19 and died last fall two months after a double-lung transplant, doctors have said.
Researchers have suggested in a study that the woman, who was not named, is the first proven case of transmission from an organ transplant in the United States, raising questions on appropriate COVID screenings for potential donors.
The researchers who conducted the study noted that one of the surgeons who handled the donor lungs was also infected, proving 'donor origin of recipient and health care worker infection.'
A surgeon became sick and tested positive for COVID-19 four days after handing the donor's lungs but recovered, according to the study - which was published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
The case, being the only confirmed transmission among nearly 40,000 transplants in 2020, appears to be an isolated occurrence, according to Kaiser Health News.
The donated lungs came from a woman from the Upper Midwest who died after suffering a severe brain injury in a car accident.
The donor's lungs were then transplanted into a woman with chronic obstructive lung disease, known as COPD, at University Hospital in Ann Arbor.
Dr. Daniel Richard Kaul, director of the Transplant Infectious Disease Service at the University of Michigan Medical School, said nose and throat samples routinely collected from organ donors and recipients tested negative for COVID-19.
'We would absolutely not have used the lungs if we'd had a positive COVID test,' Kaul told Kaiser Helath News.
He added: 'All the screening that we normally do and are able to do, we did.'
By the third day after the transplant, the woman 'developed worsening fever, hypotension, and ventilator requirements' and imaging showed a lung infection, according to the study.
When the patient started presenting with septic shock, doctors decided to send samples from her lungs for coronavirus testing - which came back positive.
Doctors returned to samples from the transplant donor's nose and throat, which had tested negative for COVID-19.
'History obtained from family revealed no history of travel or any recent fever, cough, headache, or diarrhea,' the study reads.
'It is unknown if the donor had any recent exposures to persons known or suspected to be infected with SARS-CoV-2.'
Doctors then tested a sample of fluid taken from deep within the donated lungs before they were implanted, which later came back positive for the virus.
Researchers said that genetic screening revealed that 'both the transplant recipient and the surgeon acquired SARS-CoV-2 from the donor lungs.'
The woman's health quickly deteriorated and she was not considered a candidate for re-transplantation. Doctors said support was withdrawn and she died on 61 days after the transplant.
The study concluded that donor-derived infection from COVID-19 'has significant implications for the health of the recipient,' but also for health care workers who may be exposed prior to the recipient's diagnosis.
The Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which oversees transplants, does not require organ donors to have been tested for COVID-19, according to Kaiser Health News.
'Transplant centers and organ procurement organizations should consider the possible perform SARS-CoV-2 testing of lower respiratory tract specimens from potential lung donors, and consider enhanced personal protective equipment for health care workers involved in lung procurement and transplantation,' according to the study.
In our family we are mostly disposable. She gets a new one daily. We are stocked up.Our kids at school are doing a great job wearing their masks. If they forget they cover their face and run to us for an extra. We have district provided cloth and surgical masks. Even the littles. They wear them pretty faithfully.
And they sometimes don’t change them. For days.
Have you ever gotten a glimpse of the inside of a child’s unwashed mask (retch)??
Thank you for sending your kids to school with masks. But for the love of god, wash them!!
ETA We offer new ones but sometimes they are attached to the nasty mask they have. Also looking at wet spots on a persons mask makes me retch. But at least they are being worn.
We need to correlate this to the economic/job crisis as well.
And some companies are wondering why they can't find workers. Forget the COVID, the amount of abuse and risk of bodily harm is not worth the minimal amount of money.
For which reason(s)? Forced vaccines or generally being overworked during the pandemic?Word on my nursing board is that there are nurses (24k) getting ready to strike …
For which reason(s)? Forced vaccines or generally being overworked during the pandemic?
More than 24,000 nurses and other health care workers at Kaiser Permanente in California and Oregon have overwhelmingly authorized a strike, threatening to walk out over pay and working conditions strained by the coronavirus pandemic.
Kaiser, one of the nation’s largest health care providers, has proposed a two-tiered wage and benefits system that would give newer employees lower pay and fewer health protections.
I can believe it.Word on my nursing board is that there are nurses (24k) getting ready to strike …
For which reason(s)? Forced vaccines or generally being overworked during the pandemic?
Its so funny bc people swear its because people don't want the vaccine. Thats not even the issue. In the south this is DEF not the biggest issue because most southern governors are opposed. This was bound to happen in the next few years---especially when people would realize the $15/min wage would not be enough. The status quo of the gig economy was never sustainable. Employers are faced with increasing wages and benefits, job flexibility voluntarily or face changing how much they stand to profit or close altogether. Many large companies will simply pivot, but many smaller companies will suffer.TLDR - Americans are resigning in droves during the Great Resignation. The largest numbers are in fields with poor pay and poor working conditions (made worse by the pandemic). The 4 fields seeing the largest numbers resigning are healthcare, childcare/residential care, retail, and restaurant/hospitality.
Workers Are Quitting These 4 Kinds of Jobs in Droves
Is America a nation of quitters? It could look that way based on the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which shows that a whopping 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in August.
The number of workers walking away has been elevated for months this year, in a trend that's been dubbed "the Great Resignation." But the figures from August represent a new high, with 2.9% of the workforce voluntarily leaving their jobs — compared to between 2.5% and 2.8% for the preceding four months and just 2.1% in August 2020.
Why are so many workers quitting? In a press release, the BLS states simply that "the quits rate can serve as a measure of workers’ willingness or ability to leave jobs."
The high levels of quitting seems to be a good indication that people are not happy with their jobs — often due to low pay and difficult working conditions — and also that they see better opportunities elsewhere, which is unsurprising given that companies must compete for employees due to a much-heralded labor shortage. The number of job openings in America fell slightly in the most recent report, but it's still near an all-time high.
As you'll see in our list below of jobs that workers are quitting in droves, many are positions that routinely deal with the public, on the frontlines of the pandemic. And many of them don't have salaries that many workers feel are high enough to justify the risks and stress of all that entails.
So, naturally, people in these positions are looking elsewhere and finding news jobs with higher pay or better conditions, when they can. Or they're possibly leaving their old industries in search of entirely new lines of work.
As the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman put it this week, "Long-suffering American workers, who have been underpaid and overworked for years, may have hit their breaking point." Here are the jobs being quit by workers in huge numbers lately:
Nurses, health care workers and hospital employees
Roughly 534,000 workers in the BLS's health care and social assistance category — which includes nurses, hospital employees and other healthcare workers — quit their jobs in August 2021. That's over 100,000 more than how many quit in August of 2020 (404,000). (BLS data groups these numbers into broad categories, so it's often difficult to tell exactly which specific kinds of positions people are quitting.)
While the August 2021 quit numbers represent a new peak in this category, tons of these employees have been leaving their jobs for months: 499,000 in April, 472,000 in May, 502,000 in June, 532,000 in July.
It shouldn't come as a big surprise either. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, nurses and hospital workers have been asked to work extra-long hours, under tense circumstances, and the pay often isn't great. Early on in the pandemic, there were vast layoffs too.
According to a recent Morning Consult poll, 18% of healthcare workers have quit their jobs during the pandemic, and another 30% say they've considered leaving. Burnout and insufficient pay have been named as the top reasons for those who quit.
Certain kinds of nurses are especially likely to feel like quitting. In another survey, from American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, 66% of nurses in critical care said that working through the pandemic has caused them to consider leaving the nursing profession entirely.
Child care and residential facility workers
These workers also fall under the BLS's health care and social assistance category, and they too are quitting in sizable numbers.
Child care employment is still down over 125,000 positions compared to before the pandemic, the Washington Post reported, and 80% of child care centers said they were experiencing staffing shortages this past summer. Low pay is probably the biggest reason for the shortage; daycare workers usually make only around $12 an hour.
Likewise, home health aides and residential care workers are generally low-paid positions — the former have median annual earnings of around $27,000 — and they too are leaving their jobs. As of July, nursing homes and residential care facilities employed 380,000 fewer workers than they did before the pandemic.
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Retail workers
America's retail workers have had it especially rough during the pandemic. More than 2 million retail workers were laid off by the spring of 2020 due to shutdowns, and many of the employees who kept their jobs — in supermarkets, pharmacies and other essential stores — found themselves on the front line of the pandemic, at heightened risk of being infected.
And the pay in many retail jobs is quite low. Median hourly wages for cashiers, retail salespeople and stock clerks were $12 to $13 in 2020, according to the BLS.
Are you noticing a pattern? People are especially prone to be quitting positions with low pay and high stress this year. Among the positions grouped under the BLS's retail trade category — mostly, workers in stores open to the public — 721,000 quit in August 2021, compared to 505,000 the same month in 2020.
Hotel and restaurant workers
Restaurant, hotel, entertainment and hospitality workers are also among the employees who have had enough this year. In some cases, the resignations in 2021 have been dramatic, like when all the workers at a Burger King in Nebraska walked out and left behind a "We all quit" sign.
While other resignations haven't been quite as dramatic, they've still been very large in quantity. A total of 971,000 workers in leisure and hospitality quit in August 2021, and most of them (892,000) were categorized in the accommodation and food services fields. In other words, they're mostly hotel and restaurant workers.
Slightly less than 7% of these workers nationally quit in August 2021 — 6.8%, to be precise. That's the highest rate of quitting by far of any industry catalogued by the BLS. (Retail trade had the second highest quit rate in August, at 4.7%.)
Roughly 700,000 hotel and restaurant workers left each month in April, May and June of this year, and then the number of quits rose to 735,000 in July before spiking to just under 900,000 in August.
Why are so many of these workers taking their talents elsewhere? As many employees and union activists say, the nation isn't suffering a labor shortage so much a "wage shortage."
President Joe Biden framed the issue in a similar way when asked about the labor shortage this past summer. His advice to businesses who were struggling to hire or retain workers was simply: "Pay them more."
Ya'll I've been talking about this non-stop cause its fascinating to me. I have shared my concerns with staffing in the Career Development forum as well. I'll probably talk about this a little more. But since the numbers came out and the new term "Great Resignation" was coined I'm intrigued.
This article was in June:
Edited to add: According to the article, 4M people quit their jobs in April as well.
So something is amiss. The first paragraph definitely taps into MOST people's feelings.
2nd guy featured shared this after deciding to take a furlough--he then quit the restaurant business after working in it 26 years:
In the months that followed, Golembiewski's life changed. He was spending time doing fun things like setting up a playroom in his garage for his two young children and cooking dinner for the family. At age 42, he got a glimpse of what life could be like if he didn't have to put in 50 to 60 hours a week at the restaurant and miss Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas morning with his family.
Oh yeah? You don't need police and health care workers? Okay. DiBlasio isn't forcing the mandate on cops. He knows better.Free to be dismissed from their jobs if they don’t get vaccinated.
I hope the interview went well!It’s a well known fact that our true CEO thinks we should consider ourselves lucky to work for him. Last year we took on even more projects on top of impossible constantly moving deadlines, no resources and they made Juneteenth a floating “All Lives Matter” holiday o stead of giving the actual day off. The puppet CEO made an empty platitude statement about diversity and inclusion on the anniversary date of Juneteenth when there isn’t a single black man or woman in leadership and on the board of directors. The only reason I was even promoted to my role was because someone quit because the project is impossible and the VP (who also recently quit) had to apologize to me last year when he repeatedly disrespected me for openly refusing to acknowledging my role as the SME in our department in helping teach and train our sites on a novel cellular therapeutic product but gave all the credit to an incompetent white trial manager that I was forced to work under and carry the entire time. I am the lowest paid trial manager doing the most work leading directors on the most high profile project and when I applied for an associate director role in another department that the previous AD knew I was perfect for and told the Director that he thought very highly of me for they completely changed the job description so I would not be eligible. This among many other reasons is why I decided to start courting the multiple much higher paying offers being flung at me and why I am about about to join my third round interview in 5 minutes. #greatresignation
So the good news is the Delaware friend of my "sis" is home as of last Friday. The friend ("K") reports she's feeling around a 6 out of 10 but overall its good news that she's home. K had the J&J vaccine. Not sure what K's husband had - he was sick but not in hospital ...So a second friend of mine has had a close call. And this one is my sister from another mother.
She usually housesits for friends in Delaware who have two cats every summer. I’ve gone with her in years past but not this year. Anyway, she gets there and finds out that the couples trip to Aruba is postponed because they tested positive prior to getting clearance for their flight. The couple was vaccinated but not sure which vaccines.
Anyway my “sis” stays at a hotel instead of their home and returns. She gets tested to be sure and is negative. But the woman from the couple who were to travel is now in the hospital as of Sunday as her oxygen levels are really low and she’s had a fever for about 5 days. My sis said the woman is really scared.