It is "ridiculous" for a whistleblower to assume, from watching a video clip that all of the Health and Human Services agency workers working onsite without protection as Americans were returning home from China, were in danger of contracting the disease, Rep. Mark Green, a former emergency room surgeon, said Friday.
"With a respiratory droplet infection, there is sort of a safe zone and there is a critical zone, a danger zone," the Tennessee Republican told Fox News' "Outnumbered Overtime." "It's typically 3-6 meters. If they were coming closer than 6 meters, I would say to the patient they needed to be in respiratory protection. If they weren't, they don't."
The people who were giving the returning Americans direct patient care most likely had protection in place, said Green, but "the people who stand around who aren't even close to the patient, they don't need it."
According to a report filed by a whistleblower, described as a senior official who oversees workers at the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), t more than a dozen workers were sent to receive the evacuees at two California airbases without training for infection control or appropriate protective gear.
"We are not going to be wearing this stuff in the emergency departments," Green said Friday. "When you go to the E.R., not everybody's going to be (dressed) up in a biohazard suit, so it's ridiculous to make the assertion."
There is a high rate of health workers in China who are being infected, but they are the ones who are seeing the "really sick" patients, said Green.
"We do need to be very careful in maintaining the protection of the health care workers," he said. "That might mean for all of us out of the population that we are not the ones buying the N-95 masks. We should leave those to health care workers."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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