03-18-2020, 02:24 PM
For those that have echoed the Administration's cavalier approach to the covid crisis..
From: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/13/o...at-we-did/
A coronavirus cautionary tale from Italy: Don’t do what we did
Many of us were too selfish to follow suggestions to change our behavior. Now we’re in lockdown and people are needlessly dying.
Until last week, the Italian public health care system had the capacity to care for everyone. Our country has universal health care, so patients aren’t turned away from hospitals here. But in a matter of days, the system was being felled by a virus that I, and many other Italians, had failed to take seriously.
The inability of the medical system to deal with the flow of patients in critical condition is not one of the problems of this complex medical emergency. It is the problem. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As a journalist, I had read, heard, and spoken to several experts explaining that the most immediate threat of Covid-19 was the hospital system becoming overwhelmed, and therefore the most pressing need was to avoid too many people getting sick at the same time, as resources are limited. (It’s what’s called “flattening the curve.”)
But that information was somehow stored in some remote interstice of my mind, covered by an incessant flow of bits and charts on the mortality rate of the elderly, political mismanagement, quarrels over under-testing and over-testing, market collapses, projections on the economic impact of the epidemic, and so on. All of this is, of course, extremely relevant — but at the same time feels totally irrelevant when lives are being lost in a situation that was preventable. As of Friday night, 1,266 people have died in Italy due to the outbreak.
So here’s my warning for the United States: It didn’t have to come to this.
We of course couldn’t stop the emergence of a previously unknown and deadly virus. But we could have mitigated the situation we are now in, in which people who could have been saved are dying. I, and too many others, could have taken a simple yet morally loaded action: We could have stayed home.
What has happened in Italy shows that less-than-urgent appeals to the public by the government to slightly change habits regarding social interactions aren’t enough when the terrible outcomes they are designed to prevent are not yet apparent; when they become evident, it’s generally too late to act. I and many other Italians just didn’t see the need to change our routines for a threat we could not see.
Italy has now been in lockdown since March 9; it took weeks after the virus first appeared here to realize that severe measures were absolutely necessary...
The rest of the article is at the link above..
From: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/03/13/o...at-we-did/
A coronavirus cautionary tale from Italy: Don’t do what we did
Many of us were too selfish to follow suggestions to change our behavior. Now we’re in lockdown and people are needlessly dying.
Until last week, the Italian public health care system had the capacity to care for everyone. Our country has universal health care, so patients aren’t turned away from hospitals here. But in a matter of days, the system was being felled by a virus that I, and many other Italians, had failed to take seriously.
The inability of the medical system to deal with the flow of patients in critical condition is not one of the problems of this complex medical emergency. It is the problem. I shouldn’t have been surprised. As a journalist, I had read, heard, and spoken to several experts explaining that the most immediate threat of Covid-19 was the hospital system becoming overwhelmed, and therefore the most pressing need was to avoid too many people getting sick at the same time, as resources are limited. (It’s what’s called “flattening the curve.”)
But that information was somehow stored in some remote interstice of my mind, covered by an incessant flow of bits and charts on the mortality rate of the elderly, political mismanagement, quarrels over under-testing and over-testing, market collapses, projections on the economic impact of the epidemic, and so on. All of this is, of course, extremely relevant — but at the same time feels totally irrelevant when lives are being lost in a situation that was preventable. As of Friday night, 1,266 people have died in Italy due to the outbreak.
So here’s my warning for the United States: It didn’t have to come to this.
We of course couldn’t stop the emergence of a previously unknown and deadly virus. But we could have mitigated the situation we are now in, in which people who could have been saved are dying. I, and too many others, could have taken a simple yet morally loaded action: We could have stayed home.
What has happened in Italy shows that less-than-urgent appeals to the public by the government to slightly change habits regarding social interactions aren’t enough when the terrible outcomes they are designed to prevent are not yet apparent; when they become evident, it’s generally too late to act. I and many other Italians just didn’t see the need to change our routines for a threat we could not see.
Italy has now been in lockdown since March 9; it took weeks after the virus first appeared here to realize that severe measures were absolutely necessary...
The rest of the article is at the link above..