Bzdek: The pandemic is taking a toll on journalists

The Denver Gazette: Not long ago, one of our senior Gazette reporters, Debbie Kelley, was outside of Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, covering a protest against vaccine mandates.

“It was this really antagonistic group of anti-vaxxers, they were really angry that I had taken their picture and asked to interview them,” Debbie told me, “and they got really vicious.” One of the protesters tried to grab her cell phone, even though they were all on public property so Debbie was perfectly within her rights to photograph, and she pulled it away and started running the quarter mile to where she was parked. “And they chased me to my car!” Debbie recalled. “It was a bad situation.” She made it safely to her car, locked herself in, and they hurled more threats at her. “It was really disconcerting because it caught me off guard,” she told me. “I was pretty pissed off about it actually.”

Nearly two years into this pandemic, health workers are burned out, disillusioned and leaving the industry in droves. As are teachers, and long-term care workers, and mental health practitioners.

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