Lady Business: Ventilators, corona caretakers, and the pink-collar paradox
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the 98th issue, published April 5, 2020.
Hazard Pay
How are you holding up? That’s become my greeting of choice these days, the practical recognition that we are now firmly stuck in the slow-moving disaster, and don’t have any idea of when it’s going to end.
Professionally my days have been occupied mostly by ventilators and other medical supplies, an extremely new-to-me topic that has a little to do with some reporting I was doing before everything broke, and a lot to do with, well, the breakage of everything. Some fun headlines from this week:
-“There are likely more unemployed Americans right now than at any time in history”
-“Americans face hunger crisis that is ‘catastrophic beyond imagination’ as SNAP benefits are harder for some to get”
-“Hospitals are running low on the most critical supply of all: Oxygen”
And my contributions, with my Fortune colleague Naomi Xu Elegant, to the pantheon of really-depressing pandemic news:
-“The U.S. needs more ventilators. Why can’t it make them in time?”
-“‘It’ll never be fast enough’: 5 questions for a ventilator manufacturer”
-“More ventilators are coming, but there’s still a shortage of people who can operate them”
The last and most recent was perhaps the most sobering story to report, because it’s one of the most difficult problems to solve. From GE to GM, everyone is rushing to make more medical supplies now -- but some of the finished products need to be carefully operated by trained healthcare workers. And there’s no quick fix for that labor shortage:
Intubating patients and adjusting the delicate dial settings on their ventilators can be done by some doctors and nurses, although most are already inundated by other work from the surge of COVID-19 cases. And “we already have a shortage of nurses and physicians in the United States,” says Marcus Schabacker, a physician and the CEO of ECRI, a patient-safety nonprofit organization. “They’re already stretched when we have a bad flu season.”
In the United States, managing ventilators is mostly done by a specially trained group of health care workers called respiratory therapists. But there aren’t enough of them: One 2015 study found that in a crisis-level public health emergency, the number of available respiratory therapists would be the “key constraining component,” meaning the number of patients on ventilators would max out at 135,000.
Which makes some experts warn that all the recent efforts to step up ventilator manufacturing might be missing the real problem.
“You’re going to run out of personnel before you run out of ventilators,” Schabacker says.
Respiratory therapists are not the most well-known or well-paid medical professionals; their roles don’t require the advanced degrees earned by doctors, or generally confer the same prestige. The median salary is $60,000. They’re mostly women. And they’re some of the healthcare workers most at risk in this pandemic, since they have to monitor and adjust the ventilators of those critically infected with COVID-19 -- often in close proximity to those patients.
It’s another, tragic paradox of the “pink-collar” caretaking professions in this country. Workers in those female-coded jobs have long struggled for respect, or better pay, even though they’re some of the most desperately needed in this country -- before or after the pandemic.
Like nursing, another role long dominated by women, respiratory therapy was in need of reinforcement even before coronavirus was a part of everyone’s vocabulary. Most hospitals were running at a 10 percent shortage of therapists already, and it was one of the fastest-growing professions in the country; the U.S. Department of Labor in 2018 predicted that another 28,000 respiratory therapists would be needed by 2028.
Now we might need that number by next month. Hopefully, if and when we come out of the other side of this, how much we actually pay respiratory therapists will better reflect their critical importance to our healthcare system, in crisis and out of it.
Lady Bits
--“ My staff was concerned that they would get jumped or beat up by some random people because they’re Asian.” Chef Douglas Kim to New York Magazine’s Grub Street Diet, which is turning one of my favorite weekly columns into a compelling, if often-grim, window into the effects of this pandemic.
--“I like how Cuomo’s slides are just spoken word poetry now” Jen Doll speaks for all of us:
--But also, “embracing the crisis leadership of Alison Roman comes with none of the baggage of Andrew Cuomo’s actual politics — and the world is certainly cooking now.”
--Speaking of which, my big outing last weekend was to the more far-flung suburban Whole Foods to find flour and dried beans so I can bake all the things, because why resist the hive mind at a time like this. Favorite (and most ambitious) project so far: Melissa Clark’s terrific Campari-olive-oil cake, which had just the right level of juicy grapefruit bitterness to balance the sweet:
-As a middling counter-balance to all of that stress-baking, my quarantine physical-activity regimen is a mix of running through my childhood neighborhood, doing some Insta TV workouts offered by my gym, and regular lunch breaks with YouTube's Yoga with Adriene. As the New Yorker explains: “To do a “Yoga With Adriene” video is to do just a little—the routines rarely last longer than forty minutes, and most clock in at the ten-to-twenty-five-minute mark. But it is precisely this relative modesty—which might admittedly be considered a drawback by more hardcore exercisers—that I find most attractive about [her] regimen.”
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