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[Page S4895]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
COVID-19 HEROES
Mr. BLUNT. Mr. President, I want to talk about two topics today. One
topic I was reminded of when I was in St. Joseph and Joplin, MO, over
the weekend, talking to healthcare providers and volunteers of all
kinds who are trying to do what they can to help us emerge from this
pandemic stronger than we were to start with.
Certainly, what first comes to mind is the healthcare workers
themselves--the medical workers, doctors, nurses, and support staff
whom we have relied on from the very first moments that we began to
realize that this virus was bigger than any health issue we have dealt
with in a long time. We are still depending on them today. At some
point someone can run out of some of the capacity and steam that you
have to do the job that needs to be done, but we see these heroes
continuing to step up, and some giving their lives.
Billy Birmingham, in Kansas City, was an emergency medical
technician. He was with the Kansas City Fire Department, and he died of
coronavirus in April. His son described Billy as selfless. He said
Billy had decided he wanted to find new ways to help people. So he
reinvented himself as an EMT when he was in his 40s so he could help
others. He was an EMT for about 22 years.
We see the emergency medical technicians and first responders out
there saving lives, bringing people into the hospital who are in a
desperate situation, infectious, as many of them can be, and at sort of
the height of suffering and unable to do much to help you help them,
but we see that happening. We are benefited by it, and we see a lot of
sacrifice in the community.
There are people such as Heather Black at the Harry S. Truman
Memorial Hospital in Columbia, MO. She donated 623 hand-sewn masks for
her colleagues and the veterans at the facility whom they care for. She
brought her sewing machine to work so that she could make masks during
her free time before and after her shift and during her breaks. One of
her colleagues said: You have to be just literally awed by somebody
that dedicated to helping people. Remember that she is making masks,
and between the breaks she is helping care for the patients at the
veterans hospital.
We see people finding different ways of being heroes in their
communities. Dozens of people in Cape Girardeau, in May, decided to put
a parade together for residents of the veterans home who were unable to
have visitors. The veterans got to the windows and the dozens of people
came by doing what they could to present a Memorial Day kind of parade.
There are groups in St. Louis and other places, but particularly the
one I was thinking about in St. Louis. They went around and collected
food and personal care items, and they took those to people who had
lost their jobs, who were suffering from the pandemic, who were
isolated in their efforts.
I talked today to a number of people in the behavioral health area
who understand that, at moments like this, people who have behavioral
health issues have logical reasons for those issues to begin to pile up
on them. You are isolated. You are sick or somebody in your family is
sick. You have lost a job or somebody you know has lost a job. And
those issues get bigger.
Then we see businesses who figure out how to use their unique set of
resources, whatever that might be, to make things happen. When we find
it hard to get hand sanitizers, a number of distilleries went into the
hand sanitizer business. Anheuser-Busch, which is not a distillery but
a brewery, used their brewery facilities to produce more than a half-
million bottles of hand sanitizer and then they used their distribution
system to get those half million bottles in the communities and places
around the country where they would do the most good.
Bass Pro Shops, in my hometown of Springfield, donated 1 million face
masks to healthcare workers on the frontlines. From delivering
truckloads of critical supplies to simply checking on our neighbors,
there are thousands of stories to tell in towns across Missouri and in
towns in Georgia, where the Presiding Officer lives. There are people
doing all they can to make this terrible situation less terrible and
this challenging situation less challenging. We are grateful to them.
I know a number of people have come to the floor today to talk about
those heroes and how they serve us
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