Posted on March 30, 2022.

Jennifer Bulaong kept a close tally of her work hours.

She arrived in the United States in 2019 with a group of fellow nurses from the Philippines, landing first in Florida before being deployed to a hospital in Missouri. And thus started her count: 5,200 hours in three years, the terms of the contract she signed with her recruitment agency. After that, she was free to permanently join the rest of her family, which had been waiting for her in Maryland since 2016.

“That became the goal, the target,” she said.

For years, she kept her head down and chipped away at the hours to close the gap between time zones, from 12 hours, to one, to none. It’s a story familiar to many other families in the diaspora, a story of distance and hard-fought reunion. But when the coronavirus pandemic hit, Bulaong and many other Filipino nurses like her found themselves part of another story with larger roles: frontline workers.

“During those first few months of Covid, you just had to focus. I had to do this, I had to help,” Bulaong said. “It took a few months for everything to sink in. I was (in) work mode.”

Grim statistics emerged as the pandemic continued, highlighting how it disproportionately affected Filipinos and other healthcare workers of color. Filipinos make up 4% of registered nurses in the United States, according to National Nurses United, the country’s largest nursing union. But according to a February 2021 report published by the group, 26.4% of nurses who died from Covid-19 and related complications in the United States were Filipino. They accounted for 83 nurses out of the 314 deaths where race and ethnicity data was available.

These numbers bring to light a community whose role in the larger national story is often untold.

Original Post: https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/10/health/filipino-nurses-cnnphotos/