Out of sight, cleaners perform critical work in COVID ICUs

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Clad head to toe in protective gear, doctors and nurses cluster around the patient, fighting to keep the coronavirus-stricken man alive.

Just behind them, unnoticed and unheard, a worker in the same protective gear goes about an entirely different task: disinfecting surfaces, collecting waste in biohazard bags, unobtrusively inching past beds and life-support machinery to mop the floor.

The cleaners of coronavirus intensive care units run a daily gauntlet of infection risks to ensure that ICUs run smoothly, and they are critical to preventing the spread of disease in hospitals. But their status as unskilled laborers in a behind-the-scenes role has left them out of the public eye.

While medical staffers are lauded worldwide for their lifesaving work during the pandemic, cleaners are rarely mentioned.

They feel "like the smallest cog in the wheel, like nobody considers us,” one said shortly before starting the painstaking process of donning protective gear to enter an ICU at the Sotiria Thoracic Diseases Hospital in Athens, Greece’s main COVID-19 treatment center.

She and her colleagues said they are treated well by the medical staff, and they praised the team spirit within the hospital. Cleaners have also been included with medical workers in the first wave of coronavirus vaccinations. But beyond the hospital gates, she said, the prevailing attitude toward cleaners is “I didn’t see you, I don’t know you.”

Some people’s scorn for cleaners is so great that the 50-year-old mother of two asked to be identified only by her initials, AB, as some relatives are unaware of her job.

“They’ll perceive it as something inferior, the fact that I’m a cleaner,” she said. Some relatives would also question the risk of working in a COVID-19...