Honoring U.S. Healthcare Workers Who Died From Coronavirus
It is always sad to hear about your colleagues dying at work. But there has not been an episode such as this when doctors and nurses died for going to work and doing their work. I have never seen such a large list of doctors and nurses who have died on duty at their clinics and hospitals.
I am an anthropologist so when i see a name posted on this long list, I am curious about that person: what sort of a name is this, some are obvious, from India or Nigeria but most of the other names are not that obvious unless it is purely mexican/latin . Filipinos usually have a combination of Spanish and Tagalog names.
My heart sank as I was going through the names... almost all of them were either Mexican/Latin or Immigrant doctors and nurses from other countries.
Among the nurses there were many from Philippines and Mexico. I decided to look at the first ten doctors who were listed in alphabetical order (i had just reached B)..
Pakistan 1
Mexico 1
Puerto Rico 1
India 1
China 1
Haiti 2
there were 5 who were retired or over 70 years of age.
Like in England, most of the health care workers who had died were not of European origin ..
To the courageous and compassionate doctors from Asia and Latin America and Africa and also the innumerable numbers of Filipino nurses and Mexican nurses and other nurses who lost their lives helping save American lives.
With Jamaican-South Indian-American Kamala Harris on the ascendancy, the definition of who is an American concretes itself into what is reality.
This land, called Turtle Island by the Natives of this country, were ravaged and pillaged by invaders from Europe. who established a fantastic country of innovation and enterprise and slavery and hospitality.
Now their descendants will learn to live with the children of slaves and also the children of immigrants. In 2035, the latter two would outnumber the descendants of the Invaders.
From NYT April 20,2020 about the deaths of doctors in the UK
For a country ripped apart in recent years by Brexit and the anti-immigrant movement that birthed it, the deaths of the eight doctors — from Egypt, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Sudan — attest to the extraordinary dependence of Britain’s treasured health service on workers from abroad.
