Thank you, Medical Professionals. An anxious nation turns her desperate eyes to thee.
The American Hospital Association, as of a few days ago, is telling member hospitals to expect a doubling rate of COVID19 in the United States at every 7 to 10 days. They’re telling their member hospitals to be ready for 90 million Americans to be infected with the virus and to expect demand for 1.9 million ICU beds — within the next 2 months.
Right now, as I type this, the United States has about 65,000 ICU beds.
We’re way beyond toilet paper and hand sanitizer shortages here.
So, from the man who told us that windmills cause cancer and that Ebola makes you “disintegrate”, it’s no surprise to see how inept Trump and his administration are in the face of the growing virus outbreak. As per usual he’s going to try to bullshit, gaslight, deny, distract and shift blame away from news he doesn’t like. It’s not going to work this time. A week ago he told us it, the hoax, was contained. As he golfed through another weekend at a luxury resort on the taxpayer dime, news broke that it’s now in over 33 states.
That we have Vice-President Pence heading up the administration’s strategy to the Coronavirus is both laughable and harrowing. This is the very same Mike Pence who, as governor of Indiana, actually contrived to worsen an HIV outbreak, has suggested that smoking doesn’t cause cancer and that we can somehow “pray the gay away” in tandem with debunked sexuality conversion theory. That’s also not going to work this time.
Our medical professionals now find themselves under intense scrutiny and pressure as the virus tightens its grip on the country. Leadership from the White House went missing a long time ago — this one now falls on the troops in the medical trenches.
While Trump recklessly pontificates about the resilience of the stock market and the Democratic “hoax” that is Coronavirus, our medical professionals are out there doing what they must. They have no choice. Even though they never signed up to this sort of wartime chaos, they took an oath to their profession and took it seriously. If only Trump had done the same when he placed his hand on the bible back in January 2017.
A global outbreak such as this is of course never a good thing — lives will be lost and economies will falter. However, there may be a silver lining to this particularly dark cloud. After three years of Trump’s pseudo-science and right-wing conspiracy theories, he is further exposed for the ignoramus that he really is. His slavish addiction to palpable crack-pot nonsense is ever more out in the open. That means that the response of the medical profession across the country allows for science and rational thought to regain the ascendancy. They have to as what are the options now that the novel Coronavirus is here? White House bloviating incantations, babbling in tongues, defer to Alex Jones, Limbaugh and Hannity? Or put your faith in actual experts, science and medicine getting the job done?
Trump simply cannot gaslight and deceive his way through crisis like he has done with so many before. Just like how with the ending to H G Wells’ War of the Worlds, it isn’t always the big stuff that can bring a nation to its knees or its senses, but rather the microbial or viral. No amount of Trumpian bluster, half-truths and grandstanding will end this crisis. Only medicine and science can truly do that. Likewise, no wall, no matter how high or how wide is any match for a growing potential pandemic. Trump may have hermetically sealed his mind off from reality a long time ago, but you cannot do the same for any one country on the planet, including the United States.
Of course, and as much as our medical professionals are now being asked to perform near miracles in the face of Trump’s ineptitude, this is of course against the back-drop of the US medical system in general.
From a public health standpoint, this is the sum of all fears. A reckoning with a basic known but often ignored fact: we are only as healthy as the poorest among us. A public health crisis, such as COVID19, needs a public health response from a public health system. That’s because health is not just a “one man is an island” deal — we live herd-like, rub shoulders with each other by the hundreds and thousands, share stores, schools, offices and parks. Sadly, we inevitably also share things like viruses. A for-profit system, such as the US presently languishes under, is simply starting from a fundamentally flawed position when confronted by something as challenging as COVID19.
Already, horror stories are emerging as to those without insurance getting tested for the novel Coronavirus and then being hit with a bill for thousands of dollars. How does that encourage people to take better care of their health and to try and prevent themselves infecting others? It simply does not. It encourages the opposite: Ignore the symptoms and go to work. Long before COVID19, there were endless cases of Americans sitting on medical issues because of cost. Why should that be any different now that the outbreak is here? People are always going to get sick — money, or an absence there of, is never going to change that.
So, as one would thank a veteran or active-duty soldier for their service to the country, I recommend we do the same for our doctors, nurses and all healthcare workers. Our lives, our parents’ and childrens’ lives, and safety are left in their capable hands.
