By Hillary Simmons

Staff Writer

Working long hours during the day and countless hours a week, healthcare workers are at the front lines of the pandemic. They are the backbone of our country right now and are putting their lives at risk to help keep this country going. They are struggling and persevering through terrifying and worsening times right now, being witnesses and heroes to death, tragedy, recovery, and loss. They are the ones standing in the front lines as we fight against an invisible enemy and are bearing witness to moments that most of us could never even imagine. We owe these heroes our complete gratitude and respect for the trying times they are facing, and the effect it has on their families too.

As the school year concludes online and a summer of quarantine is on the horizon, healthcare workers struggle to find childcare. According to the Center for American Progress, some 4.6 million health care workers have children that are too young to be left home alone-30% of America’s healthcare workforce. They also conclude that 269,303 healthcare workers in Florida have children under the age of 14.

MAST sophomore Jamiya El-Gordon discusses the challenge of juggling her school work and caring for her 1-year-old sister. Her mother is a Pharmacy Technician who works in both a hospital and a drug store.“I have to act as a second parent to my sister sometimes. I’ve had to do things I’ve never had to do for her before, like waking up early in the morning when she does, making her breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and giving her a bath. Sometimes I don’t really feel like doing my schoolwork after chasing around after her all day,” Gordon said.

El-Gordon also mentioned concern for her mother’s safety at work. “Sometimes I do worry about my mom being in an environment where people do have the virus and she could get it herself, bring it to us, and I don’t know if she can recover from it, so it’s just a lot on me sometimes,” Gordon said. Many other families are struggling with this across the world, parents unable to see their children for weeks or months in fear of spreading the virus.

Miami Country Day School student Abigail Cherenfant talked about a different kind of responsibility-becoming her mom’s therapist. Her mother is an associate director at a nursing home in North Miami Beach.“Personally, I have been less worried about my mother’s physical health, but more so her mental health. Working with high-risk patients, many of them have died. Death is never an easy thing. It is common…especially in the medical field, but it all accumulates into one big thing that can have a toll on a person’s mental health,” Cherenfant said.

Annalis de Armas, MAST junior Amber Haydar’s sister, is a registered nurse at a hospital who works on a coronavirus quarantine floor. “Since we have become an isolation floor, the hours feel so much longer and dreadful because you can feel the tension in the air. It’s not comfortable to be around COVID-19. It is constant exposure,” de Armas said. She also expressed worry about the potential mental health effects on healthcare workers. “Personally, I have been having random anxiety attacks and it must be from the constant stress I am under…and I believe healthcare workers will suffer from a form of PTSD after all this. I cannot picture being able to be at work without a mask again and feel safe. I cannot picture touching my patients’ hands without the fear of COVID-19. Nothing will be the same. Nothing will be like the way it used to be. People keep saying, ‘I can’t wait till we go back to normal,’ but us healthcare workers have accepted the fact that we will never go back to “normal”, this will become our new normal,” de Armas said. This just goes to show that while the coronavirus strongly affects the world as a whole, it is hitting the individual people in unique ways.

To show our respect and appreciation to the incredible heroes who are our healthcare workers we have to do whatever we can to make sure their number of patients do not rise, that they do not have to continue to bear witness to death every day. It is crucial people take quarantine seriously, that workers take every precaution to stay safe and keep others safe. This is not a time to be selfish, it is a time to be kind and considerate, to be a community that stands strong in the face of coronavirus.