SAN JOSÉ – The only sign of holiday joy on Christmas morning in the emergency department of Kaiser Permanente San Jose was a line of garlands nailed to the doctors’ station.
So when a team member came running down the hall on the morning of December 25 dressed in an inflatable Christmas tree costume, the moment of lightness was a welcome relief.
“She was just spreading joy,” said a nurse who worked that morning.
Instead, his battery-powered, air-powered suit may have spread the coronavirus throughout the ER. In the following days, 44 employees were infected, and on Sunday night, Kaiser announced that one of the employees who worked on Christmas Day had died, a tragedy that is making headlines around the world. It was not clear on Monday whether any visitors or patients at the unit were also infected.
This is the air-powered costume that an employee wore in the Emergency Department at Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center on Christmas Day to spread joy. It turns out that the employee unknowingly had covered, now 43 employees have covered. Kaiser investigating whether the costume blower helped spread the virus. pic.twitter.com/DLLi8z5e2T
– Marianne Favro (@mariannefavro) January 3, 2021
Many of the sick employees had already received the first of two doses of the COVID vaccine the previous week, Kaiser said, but its partial effectiveness – which usually starts in about 10 days – has had no effect. The woman in the costume had no symptoms at the time, but later tested positive.
In an interview on Monday, the nurse – who declined to be identified because she feared for her work – gave one of the first internal reports of how the deadly virus may have spread. She explained that sometime between 9 am and 10 am, the woman in the suit spontaneously appeared at the nurses’ central station. The nurse was wearing a mask and face shield when she briefly interacted with the woman in costume from about two meters away, she said.
Two days later, on December 27, the nurse fell ill, with mild symptoms of COVID-19 ever since. Most of her co-workers started feeling ill at the same time, she said, and although she knows of co-workers who have severe symptoms, she does not believe that any are in hospital.
How can a tree suit with a red nose and a silly smile become a lethal superspread? A battery-operated fan helps to inflate the tree and may have spread viral droplets farther than normal person-to-person spread.
The nurse emphasized that there was no party or crowd around the woman in costume and that her arrival in the tree costume was a “momentum” and not planned. Everyone in the emergency department wear masks, said the nurse, and “we don’t hug.”
The first reports mistakenly suggesting a party atmosphere in the emergency department “painted us in a way to be irresponsible when we were working hard to save lives. We are not seeing our families. This portrayed us as not caring about our community. “
The annual Christmas party had been canceled a long time ago and, unlike previous years, no one wore Santa hats or walking sticks in the emergency room – they are very easy to wrap around face shields and protective respirators.
The cheerful Christmas tree was “so innocent,” said the nurse.
As she described it, “You just saw this Christmas tree jumping towards you, and it makes you smile. It was a brief moment of levity, and you go back to work. “
The death of a staff member – allegedly a registry worker – was a crushing blow to the hospital staff, who are already exhausted after treating patients with COVID for 10 months and remain “a heavy burden” for the woman with the costume.
The tragedy is like “a death in the family,” said the nurse.
“We are physically exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed, and this is more than that,” she said. “People don’t realize the price it costs and just what it takes to get in and do what we do. Yes, we chose this profession and we are all very good at our jobs, but that doesn’t make it any less stressful or less emotional or less devastating when you lose a family member. “
The Santa Clara County Health Department is investigating the outbreak.
“Obviously, this is a highly unusual situation involving a well-meaning team member acting on his own without notice or approval,” according to a statement by Irene Chavez, senior vice president and area manager at Kaiser Permanente San Jose Medical Center.
The hospital is conducting contact tracking to notify and test any staff or patients who have been exposed and is adding weekly tests to the team.
The hospital did not respond on Monday if the woman in the suit worked that day’s shift. He said he was investigating whether the virus had spread beyond those who worked that morning. He also did not explain his policy on coronavirus testing, which the nurse said was a sore point for several nurses who complained that the hospital started more rigorous testing of the team only after the outbreak.
Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California at San Francisco, said the outbreak appeared to be a combination of “so many unlucky things”, including the unusual breath-blowing suit and the timing of the shots.
Although there is a slight variation depending on whether the vaccine is from Pfizer or Moderna, each generally takes about two weeks to be about 80-90% effective. In the first 10-14 days, it is almost 50% effective, she said.
“That is why some of these health professionals received a dose and still received COVID,” said Gandhi.
Nurse Kaiser said she is still baffled by the fact that this fantasy with the battery ventilator may have caused so much damage and she does not understand how the people who worked at the end of the day also got sick.
“It just doesn’t seem entirely plausible that it was all hers, because it was just a moment compared to what we dealt with all the time,” said the nurse. “How can it be that if it happened at 9 in the morning that people were getting infected at three in the afternoon? This can happen? Yes. But was it tragically a coincidence or something? We just don’t know. “
Editors Emily DeRuy and Evan Webeck contributed to this report.