Photo: Nurses singing “We Need PPE’s” (personal protective equipment) in Oakland

Hospital healthcare professionals are dying – many because they do not have adequate personal protective equipment (PPE) such as gloves, masks, gowns, shoe booties, etc.

Countless hospitals for years utilized costly public relations, touting that their facility provided the best care insurance could buy. Many of us in medicine recognized the hype.

Statistically with this crisis, I worry healthcare professionals on the front line who become infected are concealed from the public to protect the hospital reputation or cash flow.

Numbers coming from East Coast teaching hospitals reveal exposure problems, but I wonder at private and nonprofit hospitals if this data could be buried because whistleblowing doctors and nurses have been threatened and financially silenced? Add the guise of “confidentiality” and HIPAA rules, and self-serving administrators can easily hide serious and culpable information.

Hospital healthcare professionals must be protected, so public health departments, local governments and other regulatory authorities must undertake careful scrutiny and demand truthful statistics.

Ask: How many doctors, nurses and hospital employees have been exposed and are now positive? How many are in quarantine? What criteria were used in allowing them back to work? And so forth.

Hospitals should show us the numbers and not jeopardize indispensable front-liners who are saving lives.

Gene Uzawa Dorio, M.D., is a geriatric house-call physician who serves as president of the Los Angeles County Commission for Older Adults and Assemblyman to the California Senior Legislature. He has practiced in the Santa Clarita Valley for 32 years.