SHALER TWP., Pa. — EMS workers with Shaler Hampton EMS have grown concerned over the last few weeks because of an increased in COVID-19 patients that they have transported.
Medics have been working around the clock, and say the increase in COVID-19 transports is alarming.
For more than two months between June to mid-August, they didn’t transport one COVID-positive patient, but recently that has changed. In three weeks, there have been 12 COVID-19 patients.
“My honest reaction is I’m disappointed. I feel strongly we don’t need to be here. We shouldn’t be here,” Executive Director, Shaler Hampton EMS Eric Schmidt said.
Schmidt said at one point this summer, he and neighboring EMS workers were planning to meet about scaling back.
“We had a meeting planned to talk about stopping masking on calls or rolling things back a bit, and that meeting turned into, how are we going to fix this moving forward again,” he said.
Right now all of his medics are still masking for the foreseeable future, and are prepared for the possibility of a COVID-19 exposure every time they do a transport.
“It’s different this time, we know what we are dealing with. We have never stopped protection from our staff. They have been though every bit of this in exemplary fashion,” Schmidt said.
His hope is to eventually get back to normal, but he thinks the key to normalcy is getting people vaccinated.
“Think of taking care of others their family, it’s transmissible whether you get the symptoms or not. Please get vaccinated, that’s the best answer for this entire thing. ,please get vaccinated,” he said.
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