None of the responses to me have dealt with the negative sides of this. And there are many, unemployment, mental health, decimating small businesses, government spending drastically increasing, people not receiving regular health and wellness check ups, increase in domestic abuse, Alcohol and drug abuse, etc...
There is an incredibly long list and the fact that all of this is weighed solely against Coronavirus curve flattening and we can't even be sure that what we have done has for sure worked. Is kind of insane to me. So I just don't find these arguments compelling as they don't even acknowledge the awful downside of what our leadership has done.
And I also know for a fact that there is a great many people not social distancing and it sure seems like we started this process well after it had already been here for months. So how effective has it been anyways. Who really even knows how much of what we did had a positive impact? I can tell you for certain that it has had a massive negative impact. So we should all acknowledge that. And it is the reason very few people have any appetite to do this again.
This is MORE than flattening the curve. Again, we had to learn how to take care of these patients without killing staff, obtain PPE, start testing which was at zero. It's not just economy, although that is what the news is selling.
I have zero problem acknowledging the negative impact on our economy, it's the cost of it all, it is absolutely unfortunate. However, who gets to decide what life is worth? If you get all of us critical care folks sick and we can't work, then you have a very decimated critical care team who gives lesser quality care and you have more people die because then you got a bunch of rookies on the job taking care of all the normal heart attacks, GI bleeds, traumas, strokes etc. It takes about 5 years to become a solid critical care RN, doctor is much longer. You don't just replace bodies like a Bolshevekian system where you thrown someone with a licence and IV and tell them to save a life. Titrating drips, managing IV Tubes, this takes years to learn. You can't learn this in a book. On top of that, we needed to get testing in place, staff has gotten exposed because there was no proper testing in the hospital on a fast turn. I get about 12 hours turn around on low suspicion patients and 2 hours on high suspicion patients. We test everyone because you get sicker depending on the size of the viral load you're exposed to. For example, if I end up assisting with an intubation or if I break circuit on a vent and expose staff when turning a Pt, then I will get sicker than the average person on the street who picks up the virus on a gas pump and then picks their nose. The severity is more significant. It's way beyond if you have diabetes are obese etc. That's partially why you get people dying in their 30s and 40s. It's beyond medical history. So essentially if you destroy your health care team, then this really breaks out, then we're all up a river.
You can look at NY and look at CA and see the difference in numbers. I'm in the Bay Area and we were largely lower because we pushed out visitors, got super strict on precautions, we hold drills on codes, get better trained and were able to get prepared via obtaining enough PPE and then learn how to gown up/down (don and doff).
So far I've seen what you've acknowledged on the side of the economy but I have some follow up questions.
1. What do you propose we do if we could go back in time and when you do, please keep in mind that we had a massive shortage of PPE nationwide, no training, no understanding the this is NOT a respiratory virus and more of a systemic virus? Present a plan that balances the economy and health care workers, keeping in mind that if it isn't good. Health Care workers would walk off the job if you don't prioritize their safety. Because a lot of them just quit or retired. Remember that the higher the viral load you're exposed to, the sicker you get so your health care workers are gonna need to be on board.
2. How were we to learn about this disease process in terms of treatment otherwise? Information sharing between countries has not been as productive so we had to learn on our own experience. How would you have sped this up? Slowing things down, gave us a chance to avoid a tsunami of patients so we could study it and devise a plan of care and identify trends. It took months to do and we're trialing better drugs now. How would you have solved for this?
3, What is the value of human life vs the economy? If we're not going to lock down, are you advocating for a herd immunity and just let everyone catch this and why are you qualified to make that decision?
I'm not trying to attack you on this so I hope you don't interpret it that way, I'm just curious to see what an alternative plan would look like. We all get to play arm chair GM here so with hind sight as 20/20 so....
