She's the ICU nurse who silently stood in protest at the Phoenix rally to reopen Arizona

It was her scheduled day off from the intensive care unit at a hospital in Phoenix, where she takes care of patients who have contracted COVID-19.

She found out that morning that a rally was planned at the Arizona Capitol building. People weary of schools and businesses across the state being closed because of the new coronavirus were going to call for closures to be lifted and the state to be reopened.

Lauren Leander texted a few nurses she knew, seeing if anyone wanted to join her there.

Leander had seen photos of medical workers at similar rallies in other states, their presence serving as a counterweight to calls to reopen businesses. She was inspired to do the same at the rally in her home state on Monday.

"That was the kind of action we could take against something like this," Leander said.

She would spend the next few hours standing silent, her facial expressions partly hidden behind her medical mask. Her body standing rigid in surgical scrubs.

Leander said she heard a stream of insults from rallygoers. People accused her of being an actor. Or, if a real nurse, one who performed dentistry. Or performed abortions.

Leander gave a brief interview to a television station but did not engage with the people walking by. Most were living their beliefs that concerns about the virus were overblown. They were not keeping apart from each other. Most did not wear masks.

She was surprised at the anger directed at her. She wasn’t a politician, after all, but a health care worker. Someone whose job it is to take care of people, whether for an illness caused by the new coronavirus, or some other ailment.

“Whether you believe in the virus or not, we’re the people who are going to take care of you one way or the other,” she said during a phone interview with The Arizona Republic on Tuesday. “It was disheartening to have those kinds of comments thrown in my face.”

Treating her first COVID-19 patient opened her eyes

Leander, 27, graduated from Arizona State University’s nursing school in 2014. She started at the intensive care unit at Banner University Medical Center in Phoenix about a year later.

In early February, the hospital created an overflow unit specifically for the anticipated surge of patients with COVID-19, she said.

Leander volunteered to work the unit.

She knew she was in a unique situation. She was young and healthy, she said, and didn’t have to worry about bringing the virus home to any children.

Still, she said, working on that first patient, a young woman in severe respiratory distress, was eye-opening. It made her realize someone her age could suffer greatly from the disease.

“I hadn’t been scared as a nurse before that day,” she said.

She has since worked 12-hour shifts three or four days a week. The unit, she said, has been running below capacity. But, she said, doctors she works with describe it as teetering on a tipping point.

“If there was an explosion of this virus, we would not be OK,” she said. “We would not have what we need anymore.”

It was for that reason that Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey imposed an order in March advising residents to stay home. He also shut down businesses that were deemed nonessential. Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego had earlier imposed an order shutting down the city’s bars and ordering restaurants to convert to takeout only.

The thought was that such measures would slow the spread of the virus, keeping hospitals from being overwhelmed.

But those orders also caused economic pain. And after a month, a group of citizens and some lawmakers had decided enough was enough. Hence, Monday’s rally.

Speeches and passing conversations at the rally, some of which were captured on videos from the events, showed myriad reasons for frustration and anger.

But a common theme seemed to be that fears over the new coronavirus were being overblown, largely by the media and by Democratic politicians.

At least 4 medical workers protest at rally

Leander was able to get one other nurse to join her at the rally. Two other co-workers, whom she didn’t know that well, joined them as the day progressed.

Leander brought some spare N95 masks, the surgical masks that protect the wearer from at least 95 percent of small airborne particles. Friends and family had bought extra ones in the previous weeks and gave them to her.

Leander and her co-worker stood on the crosswalk between Wesley Bolin Plaza and the state Capitol grounds. Her original intention was to block traffic. She had seen that at other cities’ rallies. But officers stopped her from doing that.

She agreed that was probably best.

“It was not the stance we wanted to take,” she said. “We didn’t want to (anger) people. We just wanted to be there.”

She thought she would be ignored. She was standing silently in scrubs and a mask. No sign. No provocation. And she was greatly outnumbered.

But she was not ignored.

“It was absolutely just an invitation for people to throw whatever accusation or comments they had at us,” she said.

“For the first probably hour, I definitely had a burning desire to say something,” she said. “I wanted to say so many things to every insult I heard.

“But that was not why I was there. That was not the statement I was trying to make. I feel fortunate I was able to say so much without saying anything at all.”

Television cameras captured some of the scenes of confrontation. A Republic photographer captured an image of a man waving a flag defiantly at her.

Leander and the other nurses with her moved with the crowd. They stood in front of the old Capitol building, now a museum, when the rally moved there.

Then, as people went to their cars, they stood again at the crosswalk so they could be seen by passing cars.

Back to work after her protest goes viral

When she saw the same four cars circling the Capitol, she figured she could call it a day.

“I took a long nap afterwards,” she said.

She woke up to find that images from that afternoon had gone viral. They were on news websites, including azcentral, and part of television news broadcasts.

She started getting messages on Monday night from friends and relatives and health care workers. By Tuesday morning, her phone “exploded,” she said, with messages from doctors and nurses across the country and Canada.

As the sun set on Tuesday, she said she was just starting to sift through the messages she had received.

But she couldn’t make it too late of a night.

She was scheduled to start her next shift at the overflow COVID-19 unit of Banner University Medical Center at  7 a.m. Wednesday.

Reach the reporter at richard.ruelas@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on Twitter @ruelaswritings.

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