Being a nurse in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic is not easy—it wasn’t easy when the crisis began, and truth behold: it may actually be getting harder for some.
Sunny, a nurse in Arkansas, a state with very low vaccination rates, says that she’s tired of hearing how “overblown” the virus has become, especially in her state, and especially from even her own friends and family.
“It’s extremely difficult to watch so many people die, and then have people tell you on Facebook or in Walmart that you’re a liar,” Sunny said. “We had people accuse us of giving their loved one something else so that they would die and we could report it as Covid. We heard it more than once that we were fudging the numbers, or we were killing people on purpose to make Covid look like it was worse than it was, or to make it look real when it wasn’t.”
Of course, as a nurse, Sunny’s biggest passion is to help people—but it’s hard to help people who don’t want to be helped.
“A lot of nurses have compassion fatigue. And I am really scared of how that’s gonna play out, because a lot of the cases that we’re seeing are in non-vaccinated individuals,” she explained.
A reporter for CNN drove around Arkansas for Sunny to talk to people about their decision to not get the vaccine. The people had all kinds of reasons why they didn’t feel comfortable getting it—whether they didn’t trust the government or that they didn’t want to be a “guinea pig” for the shot.
Sunny didn’t go along for that—she says that she gets really upset when she meets people who don’t believe in COVID.
In fact, to help spread awareness bout the matter, she When Sunny meets Covid deniers in real life, she s made a TikTok account, which has racked up nearly 140,000 followers. She posts everything from nurse-related comedy to what work really looks like for a nurse who deals with COVID all the time.
While her posts are sometimes well-received, other people refer to her as a “crisis actor”—aka an actor paid by the government.
Her response to these people is kind of amazing. Check out the video below to hear what she does when this happens—and also to hear from people all over Arkansas about their experiences with COVID and vaccine opinions, too.
What do you think about Sunny’s prank on people who are rude to her?