‘Disinformation Is Killing Us’: ‘Former Texas Nurse Shares Experiences Of Working On The Front Line

Ashley Bartholomew, a former nurse in El Paso, TX, tells Craig Melvin about her decision to resign as a nurse, and a recent interaction with a Covid-19 patient who believed the virus to be nothing more than the flu.

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Ashley Bartholomew, who worked in hard-hit El Paso, described to MSNBC’s Craig Melvin what happened when she encountered a patient in the intensive care unit who was infected with the coronavirus but was still insisting that the pandemic was fake news.

“I was so shocked in the moment when he was saying this to me,” she said. “He's in a Covid ICU, and he's still kind of denying the severity of the situation.”

Bartholomew says this moment “showed me the power of denial and how misinformation and disinformation is killing us.”

“And it made me, you know, nervous for not only this one patient,” she said. “If he's thinking like this, there's potentially thousands or millions more and we're in trouble if that's the case.”

Bartholomew said she didn’t blame the patient. “It's hard though, when we have these mixed messages from a national level, down to a state level, and then even here in El Paso, at the local level,” she said.

Trump last month was branded the world’s biggest spreader of coronavirus misinformation by Cornell University researchers after they compiled a lengthy list of false claims the president made about Covid-19 since the start of the pandemic.

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