Worse Than the Disease

WH Coronavirus Task Force Briefing, March 20, NBC News

During the weekend President Trump tweets, in all-caps:

WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!

Throughout the course of this pandemic, the White House’s 'tone' shifts back and forth. The tweet launches another shift and a campaign, presaged and echoed by right-wing media and politicians, to plant the idea that the country must quickly 're-open' again to prevent further economic damage:

Easter’s a very special day for me. Wouldn’t it be great to have all the churches full? You’ll have packed churches all over our country … I think it’ll be a beautiful time.

So, is the cure worse than the disease? Let's hear from a patient – Kat Powers:

Here’s a weird side effect you may notice, between the headaches and the sore throat. Your pee will smell disgusting. Like you drank sewage or something. The rest of you might start to smell too, but soon enough you won’t care. Or you'll lose all smell. 

I’ve been watching my super-healthy kids deal with this. All 5’11 of one of my kids curled up in a ball from the body aches and wracked with coughs. No one could watch that and think “meh, it’s like the flu.”

So that’s the mild form of the disease: she did not go to the hospital, she was not placed on a ventilator, she did not even got tested. The descriptions remind me of reading The Hot Zone; they turn me inside out.

Let's hear from ER doctors – at Elmhurst Hospital, Queens (embedded 'guerilla' video by Dr. Colleen Smith):

Today is kind of getting worse and worse. We had to get a refrigerated truck to store the bodies of patients who are dying. We are right now scrambling to try to get a few additional ventilators or even CPAP machines. If we could get CPAP machines we could free up ventilators for patients who need them.

Leaders in various offices from the President to the Head of Health and Hospitals saying things like 'we're going to be fine, everything's fine.' And from our perspective, everything is not fine. I don't have the support that I need, and even just the materials that I need physically to take care of my patients. And it's America. And we're supposed supposed to be a first world country.

The refrigerated truck got me – devastating and sobering.

Last year, the Global Health Security Index published a report ranking the US at the top of a list of one hundred and ninety-five countries, with a score of 83.5 out of 100. President Trump cited this report in a press conference in February. And yet, nurses in New York city are wearing garbage bags after running out of disposable gowns. If we have this amazing score, and we are so prepared, why's it all going pear-shaped?

Here in Portugal, the government is extending the state of emergency past Easter, to April 16th.

Today, the world is nearing a half million cases of COVID-19, with well over twenty thousand deaths. The US reports almost seventy thousand cases and over a thousand deaths. Portugal reports over thirty-five hundred cases and sixty deaths.

cases: 491,276 global • 69,219 USA • 3,544 Portugal

deaths: 22,165 global • 1,054 USA • 60 Portugal

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UPDATE [10:30PM GMT]: The US passes China and Italy and now has the most total confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the world (82,547 vs 81,285 vs 80,589); the world total passes half a million (509,427). Things seem to be really accelerating now.

An excellent essay describing how COVID-19 may be affecting the political situation in the Monongahela Valley, near where I grew up.