It's rare to see people taking it seriously. We're having a COVID outbreak at the long-term care facility I'm working at this week, just like a week or two after we finally had no more COVID in the building. We can have signage up everywhere stating you must wear a mask when in the building, but the instant they go into a room, they'll just take it off. We've tracked it down to two scenarios that could've started this latest one, both are introduced by family visiting and not masking properly. Not like anybody does contact tracing so we can't figure out who had it originally and brought it in to make sure the people around them got it because frankly both sources have the family COVID positive so either one could've done it. We had also recently downgraded from n95s to surgical masks since community spread had begun to stay low but that's now over since it's back in the building. Of course the one family insists that it was the staff in the facility that caused the outbreak and thus spread it when the staff are the only ones that wear the masks properly and regularly at almost all times excepting lunch breaks.

One of the COVID+ people wants to get out of her room and since she's technically asymptomatic the CDC guidelines state that if she masks up, she could technically go out in public. I still can't really get other healthcare workers to outright condemn the CDC but I do get exasperated sighs.

I absolutely hate having to spend 5 minutes going in/out of a COVID+ room making sure I have full PPE. You have the gowns which take time to put on and you have to keep an eye on not running out of since everyone uses, you have gloves that you hope are in your size at the isolation station because again, everyone's using it, the face shields are encouraged to be reused so you have to sanitize it once you leave the room, and you have to get a new mask every time as well and with the ones at work, they just have rubber bands as their straps so have fun ripping out chunks of hair each time you change the mask, and also one of the COVID+ people is also trying to intentionally infect staff.

I hate this all so much. I hate that I just have to adjust to making this the new reality I exist in. When trying to console an old woman bawling because she's COVID+ and can't see her family because they're COVID+ too I can't say anything. It's not her fault really, but it's not like I can say it's the fault of our shitty government because that means nothing to a person suffering in the moment and gets into territory that you shouldn't touch as a healthcare worker. The response has been such an abject failure that you can't even console someone with COVID anymore.