One-third of COVID nurses' deaths in the U.S. are Filipino Americans

Of the 213 registered nurses who have died of Covid-19, 67, or about 31%, are of Filipino descent, according to a report by the National Nurses United.

The deaths of Filipino and Filipino American nurses are alarming high because they only make up 4% of RNs in the United States.

The NNU report, Sins of Omission: How Government Failures to Track Covid-19 Data Have Led to More Than 1,700 Health Care Worker Deaths and Jeopardize Public Health, condemns the failure of federal and state governments to track and publicly report transparent, accurate, and timely data on the Covid-19 pandemic.

In California, where about 20 percent of nurses identify as Filipino, they account for nearly 70 percent (11 of the 16) COVID-19 deaths, according to the California Nurses Association.

Nurses of Filipino descent are more likely to work in higher-risk roles within hospital systems, such as the intensive care unit, emergency medicine or telemetry units, where high-risk patients are under constant electronic monitoring — putting them directly in the path of COVID-19, said Catherine Ceniza Choy, PhD, a professor of ethnic studies at University of California, Berkeley.

"Filipino nurses, here specifically in the U.S., are concentrated specifically in inpatient critical care services," Choy told the Mercury News. "Many of them are also caregivers at home, not only of children, but also their parents and other elders. And so part of the problem with the pandemic is these multiple layers of vulnerability and exposure."

The Sins of Omission report researched and confirmed the deaths of more than 1,700 health care workers. The report includes a list of the known names of 213 registered nurses who died of Covid-19 as of Sept. 16, as well as the known names of 617 additional health care workers.

Highlights of the report, as of Sept. 16, 2020, include: 

» At least 213 registered nurses have died of Covid-19 and related complications. » 124 (58.2 percent) of the 213 RNs who have died of Covid-19 and related complications are nurses of color, reflecting the broader disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on communities of color in the U.S.1 Just under one quarter (24.1 percent) of registered nurses in the United States are people of color.2 

» 67 (31.5 percent) of the 213 registered nurses who have died of Covid-19 and related complications are Filipino. Filipinos make up 4 percent of registered nurses in the United States.3 More than half of registered nurses of color who have died to date have been Filipino (54.0 percent). 

» 38 (17.8 percent) of the registered nurses who have died of Covid-19 and related complications are Black. Black nurses make up 12.4 percent of RNs in the United States.4 Nearly one-third of RNs of color who have died to date have been Black (30.6 percent). 

» At least 1,718 health care workers, including registered nurses, have died of Covid-19 and related complications. » Of the 1,515 health care workers, including registered nurses, for which facility information is available, 448 (29.6 percent) worked in hospital settings and 1,067 (70.4 percent) worked in nursing homes, medical practices, for emergency medical services (EMS), and in other care settings. 

» Nearly one-third of the hospital health care workers who have died were registered nurses: 143 (31.9 percent) of 448 total. 

» There are at least 258,768 cases of Covid-19 infection in health care workers, 166 percent of the 156,306 cases reported by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

NATIONAL NURSES UNITED 

“All of my nurses are amazing, but Filipino nurses do have the culture where their patients always come first,” said Annette Sy, who oversees 1,500 nurses (25% of them Filipino) as the chief nursing officer for Keck Medical Center of University of Southern California and who is married to a Filipino American physician. 

“I have Filipino nurses who are in that protected category, above 65 years of age, who could stay home and I wouldn’t question it, but they say, ‘I have to be here to help my patients,’” she told STAT, a medical journal.

Philippine Nurses Associaiton of America

The NNU calls for standardized, timely reporting between states and localities, rather than the current piecemeal approach, which undermines effective interpretation. A lag time of even a week can delay an effective response. Nurses call on all states and localities to publicly report at least the following data (for more details on what governments should report, read the statement):

• Daily reporting of data (as well as cumulative totals) on diagnostic testing and case counts at national, state, and county/local levels.
• Daily reporting and cumulative totals of data on health care worker infections and deaths at an establishment level, such as the specific hospital or business.
• Data on symptomatic cases must be reported at national, state, and county/local levels (influenza-like illness and Covid-like illness).
• Daily reporting of data on hospitalizations and deaths must be reported at national, state, and county/local levels.
• Hospital capacity data must be reported at national, state, and county/local levels; must be updated in real time; and must include total and available hospital beds by type (e.g., ICU, medical/surgical, telemetry, etc.), staffing, health care worker exposures and infections, and nosocomial (hospital-acquired) patient infections.
• Data on the stock and supply chain of essential personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies must be reported at national, state, and county/local levels.

“We cannot forget the deaths of so many health care workers, which includes 213 nurses,” said Zenei Cortez, RN, a co-president of NNU who works at Kaiser Permanente in South San Francisco. 

“These deaths were avoidable and unnecessary due to government and employer willful inaction. Nurses and health care workers were forced to work without personal protective equipment they needed to do their job safely. It is immoral and unconscionable that they lost their lives," said the Filipino American RN. 

Website pays tribute to the Filipino care givers who perished on the frontline against the deadly COVID-19

 

On the Kanlungan website, one sees row after row of smiling brown faces, most of them immigrated to the U.S. or Great Britain to shore up a gap in health care workers. Hundreds of them. All of them died from the coronavirus.

Finally, a group has taken up the task of honoring the hundreds, thousands of workers -- nurses, health techs, doctors, senior caregivers and related field -- who have died taking care of coronavirus patients.

When the coronavirus began spreading in the U.S., knowing the disproportionate number of Filipino healthcare workers in the U.S. hospitals, I began reporting their deaths.

My purpose was two-fold: One, to pay tribute to the Filipino healthcare workers in the U.S.; Two, to bring attention to the vital role they play in the healthcare system.

It started out one death a week, then two and three a week. Then I began getting reports from Great Britain of the nurses dying in the National Health Service. The task was made. difficult because, back then -- a whole seven months ago but it feels like a year -- no one was keeping track of the ethnicity of the fatalities from the coronavirus. Finally, the task overwhelmed me, a lone blog written by an ex-journalist. I gave up because they were coming in too fast.

Today, it is hard to keep pace. It feels like the deaths of Filipino caregivers working in hospital ERs and CCUs, group homes for seniors  or assisted living facilities is being recorded daily. 

The Kanlungan website was founded by Jollene Levid, a Los Angeles resident, who noted the difficulty of keeping track of all the Filipinos dying from the pandemic.

After a couple of aunts died after contracting the virus from paitents they were caring for, she found out that no one had a data based identifying the Filipino victims.

"Every single day, we're still combing the news. We're still checking to see if more testimony have been submitted by loved ones," Levid told an NPR interviewer. 

Making the task more difficult is that many hospitals and care facilities don't record the race of employees claimed by the virus. Clues of their ethnicity come their name or a photo, searching through their social media.

Kanlungan, which means "refuge" or "sanctuary," was created as a memorial to the people of Philippine ancestry who make up a huge sector of the global healthcare system. "This to remember them as human beings," says the website, "not simply as a labor percentage, a disease statistic or an immigration number."

What is surprising is according to Kanlungan data, three times the number of Filipino healthcare workers have perished in the United States than in the Philippines.

The Philippines continues to be the leading exporter of professional nurses to the U.S., although the ways they immigrate have changed over time, says UC Berkeley ethnic studies professor Catherine Ceniza Choy, author of the 2003 book, "Empire of Care," based on her research on nursing and migration in Filipino American history.

About one-third of all foreign-born nurses in the U.S. are Filipino. And because they are most likely to work in acute care, medical/surgical, and ICU nursing, many “FilAms” are on the front lines of care for Covid-19 patients.

Since the 1960s, there have been over 150,000 Filipino nurses who have migrated to the U.S. They make up about 4% of the registered nurses in the country. In California, Filipinos make up about 20% of the nurses.

Added to this number are multiple generations of U.S.-born Filipino Americans who carry on the family tradition of nursing.

Kanlungang is supported as a project of AF3IRM, formerly known as GABRIELA. "a transnational feminist organization."

AF3IRM is an acronym, which stands for Association of Filipinas, Feminists Fighting Imperialism, Re-Feudalization, and Marginalization. The Filipinas in our name refers to our history prior to our evolution to becoming AF3IRM — we previously organized as GABRIELA Network. It’s not an easy acronym but it speaks to how we are anti-imperialist, transnational feminist and against oppression in all its forms,” said Barbara Ramos, AF3IRM's communications director in the Los Angeles Times.

If you wish to honor a healthcare worker of Filipino descent who died from the virus, submit your information here.

In the era of coronavirus: Filipino nurses on the frontlines despite deadly danger

Filipino American medical workers have suffered some of the most staggering losses in the coronavirus pandemic. As International Nurses Week launches today (May 6) with platitudes of gratitude in the midst of AAPI Heritage Month, it's time America recognizes the Filipino Americans' heroic role in caring for the ill, infirmed and elderly.

In the New York-New Jersey region alone, In doing the research for their fine article about Filipino healthcare workers, ProPublica learned of at least 30 deaths of Filipino health care workers since the end of March and many more deaths in those peoples’ extended families. The virus has struck hardest where a huge concentration of the community lives and works. They are at “the epicenter of the epicenter,” said Bernadette Ellorin, a community organizer.

By my rough, unscientific, count, 20 Filipino American nurses have fallen to the coronavirus pandemic. Add a doctor and a nursing assistant, and a transporter and that equals 23 Filipinos in the healthcare field who have died from the virus.

The number of deaths among Filipino American nurses and other healthcare workers is most likely vastly undercounted.

In doing the research for their fine article about Filipino healthcare workers, ProPublica learned of at least 30 deaths of Filipino healthcare workers in the hard-hit New York-New Jersey area since the end of March but doesn't distinguish between the nurses and other healthcare professionals.

RELATED: Filipino nurses vital to US healthcare

In the New York-New Jersey region, nearly a quarter of adults with Filipino ancestry work in hospitals or other medical fields, a ProPublica analysis of 2017 U.S. census data found.

A 2018 survey of Filipino nurses by the Philippine Nurses Association of America found that a large proportion of respondents were concentrated in bedside and critical care — “the opposite of social distancing,” executive director Leo-Felix Jurado told ProPublica, making them particularly vulnerable to contracting the coronavirus.

It will take someone with better resources than Views From the Edge to determine the true impact the coronavirus has had on the healthcare workers of Filipino descent. 

Who knows how many of the staff members of the nursing homes or homes for the elderly were Filipino? These businesses are reluctant to name their workers, much less identify them by ethnicity.

Posts below by Views From the Edge tell some of their stories but barely scratch the surface of the toll taken on Filipino American healthcare workers, most of whom are nurses.

• 9 of 23 New York nurses that died from coronavirus were AAPI; 7 were Filipino American RNs.

• Kansas City nurse dies one week short of retirement

• Nurses in Detroit and a prison facility fall to coronavirus

• Howard University veteran nurse taken by the pandemic

• Veteran nurse in Florida falls to COVID-19

• Illinois RN and New Jersey nurse among family members who perish

To protect patient privacy, most hospitals and healthcare facilities are reluctant to reveal the race of staff members who died from Covid-19. That makes it difficult to ascertain all the deaths of Filipino American workers. It also hides the great dependency that the American health system has on foreign medical graduates, especially nurses from the Philippines.

Why are there so many Filipino nurses in the US? 

"One untended legacy of tthe half-century the Philippines was a US colony, 1898-1946, was the creation of hundreds of American-style nursing schools that eventually produced tens of thousands of caregivers a year, making the country “the leading exporter of nurses in the world,” Catherine Ceniza Choy told ProPublica. Choy is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History.

Certainly, at this unprecedentied time in history, whether or not it was exploitation or an opportunity for Filipinos, there is an abundance if well-trained Filipino nurses willing to leave the Philippines and the comfort of family, making them in demand the world over, not only in the US and Canada, but Australia, Germany, Japan and the Middle East.

Photo by Linda Bruch

Northern Rockies Medical Center has four Filipina registered nurses on staff and they are loving living in rural Montana. Pictured are, left to right, Geraldine Genis, Michelle Boltron, Dina Elca and Mary Jell Capillo.

Even if they get placed in low-paying positions, the pay they receive is greater than what they would eaern in the Philippines, allowing them to send money back home for their relatives. Perhaps this Filipino value -- opportunity to help the family -- is worth the loss of familiarity and comfort of their barrio or family.

The value of kapwa, a Filipino attribute contributes heavily to the international reputation of Filipinos as caregivers: nanny's, teachers, eldercare companions and nurses. 

“Kapwa is a recognition of a shared identity, an inner self, shared with others. This Filipino linguistic unity of the self and the other is unique and unlike in most modern languages. Why? Because implied in such inclusiveness is the moral obligation to treat one another as equal fellow human beings. If we can do this – even starting in our own family or our circle of friends – we are on the way to practice peace. We are Kapwa People,” says Professor Virgilio Enriquez, founder of Sikolohiyang Pilipino.

Sometimes described as "self-sacrifice," it contributes to the willingness of the nurses to put the patient before one's self, which sometimes put the Filipino nurses in conflict with American values and hospital rules of patient care.

“They have such a profound willingness to work that they would forget their own well-being,” says Choy to ProPublica. Kapwa.

“They would think of their loved ones in the Philippines — if they don’t work, then they can’t send money back home.” Kapwa.

Filipino nurses have what it takes to survive the worst scenarios such as COVID-19, says Patrick Singson, a n ER nurse working in New York City. 

“Filipinos are fighters. We don’t give up. We don’t complain. Others would have already quit. But Filipinos, we’re solid,” he says. Kapwa.