In February 2020, the United States was still largely unaware of the impending COVID-19 pandemic.
Yanti Turang, a Kyneton born and raised nurse who now calls New Orleans home, joined her colleagues and the rest of the city taking part in the city’s annual Mardi Gras, completely unaware they were participating in a super-spreader event.
“Mardi Gras is a time of revelry, it’s when the city of New Orleans stops, it truly stops for four to five days, it doesn’t matter where you work, it’s this amazing moment in time,” Yanti said.
“We dance in the streets, we go hear music, we parade, and a lot of people from across the United States come to visit New Orleans at that time, so – as you can imagine – we have hundreds of thousands of people in the city.”
Five years earlier, amid an Ebola outbreak crisis in West Africa, frontline healthcare workers in Sierra Leone put out a global call for help.
Yanti was among those who responded, though she could never have imagined the experience would lead her to later be called upon by the Louisianan state government to help establish a pandemic triage hospital in the New Orleans Convention Centre.
Soon after Mardi Gras 2020, an overwhelming number of sick people began presenting to the emergency department at the university hospital where Yanti then worked, and her experience in Sierra Leone made her acutely aware of how unprepared the hospital was for such a scenario.
“March 9 we got our first positive case in New Orleans, March 10 our ER was full,” she told the Express.
“We didn’t have enough PPE (personal protective equipment), physicians didn’t know enough about the virus, it was a complete disaster.
“We were infecting patients, patients were infecting healthcare workers.”
Yanti got to work establishing the government-commissioned COVID hospital and spent an exhausting seven months helping to run it. The pop-up hospital was designed to treat up to 2000 patients at a time and proudly recorded no fatalities.
Returning to Australia and to Kyneton in December last year, Yanti found a nation relatively unbruised by the pandemic.
“It’s interesting coming from the US into Australia, which is kind of back to normal; seeing that life can go back to normalcy gives me hope,” she said.
“I think as a human race we’ll bounce back relatively well, but I don’t think we can anticipate the trauma of the loss of all the people who have died because we’re still in a state of emergency. I think that will be more profound in the coming years.”
Yanti’s message to Australians is to get vaccinated, as soon as possible, no matter what the fear and discourse going on right now may be.
“Everyone please get the vaccine. This needs to be a collective effort of people across the globe to vaccinate to keep everyone safe,” she said.
“The fact that we have the ability to receive the vaccine is access that millions of people still don’t have.
“The virus doesn’t care about borders. If we want to reach herd immunity we need a collective global effort. So please vaccinate, and also anticipate that you might have to do it again.
“All of the resources of the entire world have been focused on the task of finding the safest vaccine to save lives and it’s unbelievable where we are, considering where we were, and it is important to step back and appreciate that.”
Yanti Turang is the founder of global healthcare non-profit LearnToLive, connecting communities worldwide to healthcare, education and clean water.
