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An alarming video features a woman with a dire message from the front lines of New York City hospitals treating COVID-19 patients.
In the 10-minute video, the woman identifies herself as a nurse practitioner who has a nurse friend who traveled to New York City to work “on the front lines” fighting the coronavirus outbreak.
“For her safety, she cannot come out and say these things, so I am her voice … She wants this to get out,” the woman says.
Sitting close to the camera, the woman, identified in some accounts as Sara, speaks calmly. About 45 seconds in, she relates what she says her friend told her, claiming:
“In New York City right now, in some of the hospitals, this is what is going on. People are sick, but they don’t have to stay sick. They are killing them; they are not helping them. She used the word ‘murder’ — coming from a nurse who went to New York City expecting to help. Patients are left to rot and die — her words. She has never seen so much neglect. No one cares. They are cold and they don’t care anymore. It’s the blind leading the blind.”
The video does not identify the hospitals, so we can’t directly fact-check its claims. However, according to research findings and responses to the video from other New York health professionals, it makes three misleading claims about COVID-19 care in New York City, suggesting that patients are dying because of intentionally shoddy care.
“I’ve never seen someone so disconnected with actual clinical care,” said Christian Castaneda, a pulmonary- and critical-care fellow at New York-Presbyterian Queens hospital, in a video he posted to rebut the viral video. “What this lady is saying is absolutely not true.”
A woman who identified herself as Rebecca, an emergency room nurse practitioner working with COVID-19 patients in New York, called the viral video “patently false” in her own rebuttal video. “I don’t know what happened in one particular hospital, but I can assure you that that is not happening where I work and it’s also not happening in the facilities of many, many of my friends and colleagues at other hospitals.”
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Alex Mahadevan is a senior multimedia reporter at MediaWise. He can be reached at amahadevan@poynter.org or on Twitter at @AlexMahadevan. Follow MediaWise on TikTok.
