The front line: Angry protesters face off against silent healthcare workers

Over 30 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in recent weeks, and despite the obvious dangers posed by the coronavirus, a nation of people is now simply desperate to get back to work.

This desperation is so intense, in fact, that people have even begun to turn on the frontline workers who have given their all in treating COVID-19 patients for months. Thousands of them have become ill, and many have paid the ultimate price in their efforts to save just one more patient. But that hasn’t stopped mobs of angry protesters from turning on healthcare workers in anger.

Disturbing reports reveal that anti-lockdown protesters have recently clashed with healthcare practitioners in hotspots across the country. In some instances, protests have resulted in gridlock, blocking ambulances, doctors and caregivers from getting to where they need to be to save lives. (Related: Pro-Trump, anti-lockdown protesters demand end to tyranny while refusing to wear masks — Here’s what happens next.)

Healthcare workers heckled for doing their job

As reported by the U.K.’s Daily Mail, protests against strict lockdown measures have sprung up nationwide, with increasingly desperate Americans pushing back against restrictions that they feel are overly strict and are suffocating the economy.

And they won’t let anyone get in their way, not even the healthcare workers fighting to save lives. (Related: Anti-lockdown protest leader infected with the coronavirus.)

The Mail reported:

Healthcare workers clashed with anti lockdown protesters in Colorado on Sunday, defiantly standing in front of the cars of demonstrators who flocked to the state Capitol in the hundreds to urge Gov. Jared Polis to lift COVID-19-induced stay-at-home orders. …

Titled ‘Operation Gridlock’, the day’s largest demonstration took place in Denver, where hundreds of protesters ignored social distancing guidelines to huddle together on the lawn of the state Capitol, waving flags emblazoned with slogans such as ‘Your “health” does not supersede my right’, ‘Freedom over fear’, and ‘I would rather risk coronavirus than socialism’.

A group of silently protesting healthcare workers dressed in their masks and scrubs stared them down defiantly as a counter-protest, obstructing the vehicles of protesters and refusing to move despite drivers sounding their horns and yelling at them to move.

Some incensed protesters went so far as to climb out of their vehicles to confront the healthcare workers, angrily ordering them to get out of the way.

One woman was captured on video hurling racist remarks at a nurse and yelling, “This is a free country. Land of the free. Go to China if you want communism. Go to China.”

Though how she concluded that a healthcare worker putting his life on the line to save desperately ill patients was somehow a supporter of communist China defies logic.

In Michigan, protesters actively interfered with the ability of healthcare workers to do their jobs.

The Independent reported:

As conservative demonstrators brought Michigan’s capital to a standstill on Wednesday with ‘Operation Gridlock’, their planned drive-by protest caused ambulances to get stuck in traffic.

Downtown Lansing was clogged with the vehicles of protesters against Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic.

Lansing Police struggled to keep traffic flowing and hospital security tried to keep entrances clear for emergency vehicles.

Baffled healthcare workers were left hurt and angry by the fact that protesters would knowingly interfere with their ability to save lives.

“To see this — traffic blocking the main intersection of a level 1 trauma center, blocking the entrance and exit to our hospital,” one healthcare workers wrote on Facebook. “Blocking patients from receiving care that they need, makes me angry. It hurts. It hurts a lot.”

While it is certainly understandable that people are desperate and angry at the devastation caused by COVID-19, surely there can be no excuse for turning on the very people who have sacrificed so much as the soldiers on the frontline in the war against that virus? We owe them more than we could ever repay, and they simply do not deserve this type of behavior.

Stay informed, stay alive. Bookmark Pandemic.news.

Sources include:

DailyMail.co.uk

Independent.co.uk