Marcial Reyes, a charge nurse in the emergency department at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fontana, suddenly found himself the patient.
He felt fatigued at work and later at home, waking up one March day with a dry cough and a temperature of 107. Reyes drove himself back to the hospital — and later discovered he had the coronavirus.
“I knew in my heart that it was COVID-19 — I was looking at what was happening in Italy, South Korea, Spain and China, and it was like, am I one of them? I couldn’t believe it,” said Reyes, 46. “I bid my wife goodbye on FaceTime and it broke my heart. I couldn’t even say goodbye to my son.”
Reyes spent 23 days in the hospital, isolated and on a ventilator for more than a week. His worst fears also came true: he had unknowingly passed the virus to his wife, Rowena, and then-4-year-old son, Marc.
As a large percentage of the essential health-care workforce in California, many Filipino nurses like Reyes have found themselves on the front lines of a deadly pandemic, risking their lives and their families’ health for the job they love. Despite the dangers, they report daily to the high-risk hospital areas in which they are likely to work.
Filipino nurses make up nearly 20% of California’s nursing workforce — the highest percentage of any state, according to a California Board of Registered Nursing survey.
Filipinos and Filipino Americans comprise about 12% of all health-care workers in California and 11% of health-care support jobs, including caregivers and nursing home aides.
“There is not a single hospital you can go to without a Filipino nurse,” said Reyes, who has multiple nurses in his family. “We take pride in our profession and our culture. We work hard, we are welcoming and we are resilient.”
Reyes and his family recovered from the virus, and he was back at his Fontana home in time for his son’s fifth birthday. After being in quarantine, maintaining a healthy diet and regular exercise, Reyes tested negative. He went back to work in May, a month after being discharged.
“For me, nursing is not just a profession; it’s a vocation … it felt good to come back (to work) knowing that I am fighting COVID with the same people who helped me fight COVID,” he said. “My faith, family and love for my profession are the important things that kept me going.”
Filipino immigrants account for 28% of the 512,000 immigrants who work as registered nurses nationwide, according to 2018 data from the American Community Survey and the Migration Policy Institute.
The exact number of Filipino nurses who have contracted the coronavirus is difficult to track. But Filipino nurses have died from the virus at vastly higher rates than other ethnic groups, reports National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union. Though Filipinos comprise just 4% — about 150,000 — of all registered nurses in the U.S., Filipino nurses make up nearly a third — over 30% — of all reported nurse deaths from COVID-19.
And in California, Filipino nurses account for 11 of the 16 COVID-19 deaths — nearly 70% — in the nursing profession, according to the California Nurses Association. The California Department of Public Health does not collect data on Asian American subgroups, but Asian Americans make up almost 6% of coronavirus cases and 11.7% of deaths, as of Sunday, Oct. 25, compared to their 15% of the population.
In the Inland Empire, two Filipino nurses have died of complications from COVID-19, as of Thursday, Oct. 29, according to Kanlungan, a nonprofit-led global database tracking Filipino healthcare workers, including nurses, who have died of the virus. Locally, Kanlugan reports, they are Crisalyn Viste, a registered nurse at Kaiser Permanente Ontario Medical Center, and Sally Fontanilla, a nurse at St. Mary Medical Center in Apple Valley, who died in early October, two weeks shy of her 52nd birthday.
Some health-care workers and unions cite a lack of protective equipment as a factor in the high rate of Filipino American cases and deaths during the pandemic — including the death of Celia Marcos. The Filipina telemetry charge nurse at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles County died of COVID-19 complications after treating a patient without proper protective gear, the SEIU Local 121RN union alleges. The union, which represents thousands of nurses in Southern California, said Marcos’s death highlights the importance of adequate protective equipment for health workers.
Research also shows that preexisting health conditions often found in older Filipinos — such as diabetes, hypertension and thyroid issues — also put them at risk. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that adults of any age with certain underlying conditions are more susceptible to severe illness from the virus.
But these risk factors don’t stop Filipinos from braving the storm.
The large number of Filipino healthcare workers in the U.S. can be attributed to the many nursing institutions established in the Philippines in the early 20th century and modeled after American nursing schools.
“At different points when the U.S. has had a labor shortage in health care, the Philippines was a key source to recruit nurses,” said Anthony Ocampo, an associate professor of sociology at Cal Poly Pomona University, citing research from Filipina historian Catherine Ceniza Choy. “There were excellent training facilities, plus they were English speaking, and so Philippine-trained nurses were an ideal group to fill the gaps in the medical field. From the Philippines side, many Filipinos who aspired to migrate abroad saw nursing as their golden ticket for a better life, not just for them, but for their entire family.”
Ocampo, who has written about Filipino immigration, colonization, gender and sexuality, says that Filipino health-care workers are great caregivers and “equipped to have empathy” toward diverse patients because, being from the Philippines, they are exposed to different cultural norms and perspectives.
Filipino American History Month , which is in October, is a good time to highlight the contributions Filipinos have had “in all arenas of American life” — from labor rights and social movements, to the fields of education, art and healthcare, Ocampo said. The month celebrates the first recorded presence of Filipinos in the continental U.S. in Morro Bay.
“Filipinos are helping to sustain the American healthcare system,” Ocampo said. “Some leave their loved ones behind in hopes of creating a better life for them, and so to hear that they are dying in droves just breaks my heart.”
Many Filipino nurses say they won’t let the coronavirus stop them from caring for patients.
Arlene Abarca, a nurse who lives in Corona, works with COVID-19 patients in the intensive-care unit at VA Loma Linda Healthcare System.
After attending Cal State San Bernardino, Abarca, 37, worked in the hopital’s ICU for nearly 14 years. When the pandemic hit, Abarca found herself putting on an N-95 mask and protective equipment for her 12-hour night shifts, where she assists those on ventilators and in isolation.
“Nursing is overall wanting to take care of other others, and this is how,” Abarca said. “I don’t see myself doing anything else … helping people at their most vulnerable.”
Abarca loves working with other Filipino nurses in her unit, whom she calls her “work family.” They watch out for one another, teach her more about the profession, and connect her with her Philippine roots by sharing recipes, language and culture.
“I’ve been blessed,” she said. “So now I feel like my blessing is to help others.”
Fiona Kelliher of the Bay Area News Group contributed to this report.
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Inland Filipino nurses risk all on coronavirus front lines - Press-Enterprise
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