U.S. clinicians are petitioning the federal government to implement a national quarantine, similar to actions adopted in other nations in recent weeks, in an effort to slow the spread of COVID-19. Other provisions in the petition, available at change.org calls for the government to urgently produce and distribute personal protective equipment (PPE) to health care workers and increase access to testing for this disease. As of March 18, the signatures was close to 98,000, with a goal of reaching 150,000.
“We started this group last Friday out of the realization that clinicians needed information about the outbreak and weren’t getting it,” said coadministrator Jessica McIntyre, MD, a pediatric hospitalist at Elliot Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire.
“We wanted to get ahead of it and connect with people before we were in the trenches experiencing it and to see what other programs were doing. From a local perspective, it has been really hard to see what people are doing in other states, especially when the protocols in our own states are changing every single day as we collect more information,” she said in an interview with Medscape Medical News.
Read more at Medscape Medical News and find the petition at Change.org.
