Laura Aber is trying to make a difference in the ongoing battle to help end the COVID-19 pandemic.
The registered nurse came out of retirement last year to help with the vaccination campaign. He is trying to inoculate as many people as possible at a clinic run by the CIUSSS l’Ouest-de-l’Ile-de-Montréal.
“I wanted to move this forward as quickly as possible and they are short on nurses so this was a good thing,” Aber told Global News.
Aber is one of 5,000 retired registered nurses who have re-entered the workforce to help protect the population from the growing spread of the virus, especially the Omicron variant.
The Quebec Order of Nurses says that 270 nurses returned during the Christmas holidays.
“When you ask for nurses to come help, they are always there,” Luc Mathieu, president of the Quebec Order of Nurses, told Global News.
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Mathieu even put his office work on hold in January to personally help administer the doses.
“At the end of each day I was very happy,” he said.
Quebec Premier François Legault said 2,500 health workers are still needed to help deal with the pandemic. It is not clear how many more nurses are needed, but Micheline Lévesque is happy to be part of the campaign.
The registered nurse is administering dozens of vaccine doses a day, most of them booster shots.
“We live in a time where we have a very contagious variant,” Lévesque said.
The Omicron variant accounts for almost 95% of all new cases recorded in Quebec. Although some studies indicate that it is not as virulent as the Delta variant, it is considered extremely contagious.
“The only active action you can take is to immunize people as much as you can and hope for the best,” Dr. Karl Weiss, head of infectious diseases at the Jewish General Hospital, told Global News.
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In the past week, an average of more than 93,000 daily doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in Quebec, the vast majority of them booster shots.
Beginning January 14, all adults will be eligible to make appointments to receive their third dose.
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Reference-globalnews.ca