No Additional Words Needed

Nan Coronavirus

From Dr. Nicholas Peluso who is an ICU doctor in Tulsa:

I am mentally and physically exhausted. I lived through hell this week. My team is stretched beyond thin. So many sick and dying, all from a “hoax”. A bloated ruse to “microchip” and control you. This isn’t a warning. This isn’t a lecture. This isn’t “fear-mongering”. This is reality. This is where we are. I’m done.

Please don’t ask healthcare workers what to do. There isn’t anything to do but hope. Hope that this thing doesn’t kill hundreds of thousands more. Hope that you or your loved ones don’t get it. Hope that it’s over soon. Hope that our lives can continue.

The time for preparation is over. This country did everything wrong and now we see the consequences. Believe WHATEVER you want. I genuinely do not care. I don’t have the strength or the time to waste arguing.

But mark my words and mark them now. If healthcare workers get sick, this is over. If we fail, so do you. There is no plan B. We have no army of healthcare workers waiting to take our places if and when we make ourselves sick caring for you and your loved ones. It. simply. isn’t. there.

So, I wish this nation luck. I wish my colleagues health and some sort of rest during this nightmare. Most of all, I wish for a nation that trusts its scientific and healthcare communities, listens to suggestions, and heeds warnings.

We are tired. We are worn out. We are your healthcare. If you’ve never needed us before, good for you. If you’ve been through something awful where you needed us and we were there for you, I hope you got the best care and recovered. If you find you need us in 6 to 10 weeks, I hope we will still be able to care for you and we won’t be taking up those ICU beds with our own sick bodies.

I fear we’ve already lost. This is not the nation I grew up in…

55 thoughts on “No Additional Words Needed”

    • And Texas too! We have a sh*tload of ignorant, arrogant rebels here. Our new cases and hospitalization stat-line is damn near vertical since Memorial Day Weekend and now from idiots from the July 4th holiday. 😠🤬

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      • The politicized “arrogant rebel” thing is less visible/audible in Blue California. But I can’t say we are particularly careful (see my comments on the cross country teams below 😦 )

        But even at places that celebrate their…rustic…character (there is a country store called “Judy’s Wild Oates Country Store” they are careful about requiring masks. The supermarket even has someone stationed at the door to make sure.

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        • I guess the problem I have is many of the restrictions seem…arbitrary…to me. I really doubt, for example, that the big reason for spikes is hair salons. Or, for that matter, gyms where everyone wears a mask and there is a disinfectant bottle every twenty feet.

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          • Here is MY wacky conspiracy theory. 🙂 🙂 Worthy of a Scott Lively. The virus was invented and distributed by the Lords of Silicon Valley to drive a final stake into Face Time and physical commerce. too many of the Silicon Valley darlings are somewhat…innumerate…(Uber has never and will never make a profit).

            I want to see this spread throughout the odder corners of the internet!

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  2. This brings me to tears for Dr. Nicholas Peluso and every other health care worker putting themselves directly in the line of fire. Many of them knowing they are placing their families in harm’s way as well. As a retired health care worker, I was blessed in my career of 45+ years to never have faced the catastrophic effects of anything like this pandemic. That our government has failed in the duty of protecting its citizens and mitigating Covid-19 when the opportunity was there for the taking is deplorable and unacceptable. That, unfortunately, cannot be changed and equally unfortunate is that exactly what Dr. Peluso foresees in the very near future will in many places in this country become the reality. This is not the nation that I thought I grew up in! Thank-you!

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  3. If there were any justice in this world, the only persons to catch Covid from this point on would be Trump and his pathetic enablers. His ignorance and arrogance have needlessly cost thousands of lives, and he still shamelessly worries about nothing but his own reelection and refuses to accept responsibility for his uncaring incompetence. As a senior citizen, I only hope I live long enough to see him go down to overwhelming defeat in November.

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    • At this point mistermuse, I am REALLY REALLY hoping that “Natural Selection” wipes out all the imbeciles who think COVID-19 is nothing and/or a hoax, with the exception of young children. The problem, however, with my morbid wish is that there seems to be so many (way too many?) that our poor ICU doctors, nurses, and workers and those beds… are not enough for a needed Imbecile-extinction. 😒 Damn it.

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  4. I fear we’ve already lost. This is not the nation I grew up in…

    My best wishes for Dr Peluso and other health care workers. Our nation has failed them.

    I look around at the way people reacted to the George Floyd killing. I look at the way people are preparing to vote Trump out of office on November. Yes, this is still the America that I love, though it has suffered much in the last few years.

    Then I look at congressional Republicans. While I disagreed with them, I respected people such as senator Bob Dole, senator Everett Dirksen, senator Charles Percy, senator Jacob Javitz. But that Republican party is no more. The Republican part that we see today is a party of traitors, criminals and racists. I used to respect senator Grassley, but he has allowed his principles to become corrupted.

    American conservative Christianity has become a cult of traitors and racists. It has become a cult that attempts to overthrow the constitution. It has become a cult which rejects the teachings of Jesus.

    We must work toward making the next election a cleansing of America.

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  5. Remember, it is not just the healthcare workers. It is everyone who was deemed an essential service worker, from grocery store clerks to garbage men to long-distance haulers.Anytime people have to work too hard, especially in stressful situations, their immune systems are going to fail. We have to find a way to prevent this from happening. Very soon!

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  6. The fact is that these idiots who believe it is only a flu like virus and no big deal, need to check out the scientific facts if they can possibly drag themselves off of the conspiracy juice and the Trump BS. This virus can cause serious permanent damage to all major organs in the body.

    Now, more than 300 studies from around the world have found a prevalence of neurological abnormalities in Covid-19 patients, including mild symptoms like headaches, loss of smell (anosmia) and tingling sensations (arcoparasthesia), up to more severe outcomes such as aphasia (inability to speak), strokes and seizures. This is in addition to recent findings that the virus, which has been largely considered to be a respiratory disease, can also wreak havoc on the kidneys, liver, heart, and just about every organ system in the body.

    https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-effects-of-covid-19-infection

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  7. The majority of the country is sane. The problem is the “stupid one-third”. The consequences of their stupidity don’t just affect themselves, but slop over onto the rest of the population — especially, in this case, health-care workers who have to try to save them.

    And frankly it’s not just Trumpanzees. It’s all the idiot spring-breakers and frat boys and what have you who refused to take it seriously or decided they could act as if this thing is over just because they personally got fed up of having to deal with it. Yes, it’s mostly the fundies, but we’ve also winked at believing in astrology and faith healing and psychic powers and healing crystals and all the rest of that blithering nonsense. The problem is that once people get used to choosing what to believe on the basis of gut feeling and wishful thinking instead of hard evidence, they start choosing what to believe about everything else the same way. Stupidity that gets entrenched in one area of life doesn’t stay confined there. It metastasizes. Then something like covid-19 comes along and those people are congenitally incapable of assessing it rationally, and other have to suffer from the resulting disaster.

    Do you have a link to the original? This needs to be more widely known.

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    • I copied this from Facebook. The name of the original poster is Thomas Clay Jr. who describes himself as “an unabashed and militant atheist who detests everything Republican.” He apparently publishes on a website called ANX Media. He also has a Facebook page named American News X.

      I did look up the doctor on Google and he’s an Internal Medicine specialist in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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  8. I’m sorry but this whole “this is not the nation I grew up in” is getting wicked old. What did everything think when they were voting for Reagan, for Bush, for every single GOP politician, even for Clinton, for all those stupid tax breaks? What the living hell? This is why we are not living in the nation we all grew up in. This is why people believe in astrology & faith healing & psychic powers & magical thinking … because there is literally nothing left to them. This nation has been hollowed out in the name of TAX BREAKS & now there’s nothing. You don’t have healthcare, you don’t have a security net, you don’t have anything at all without money & you don’t have money without taxes. This has been forty years in the making. What the hell did everyone think was going to happen?

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      • Nixon era. The Powell Memorandum where our owners decided to hollow out the economy because they thought they could simply coupon clip and extract while all the manufacturing and productive economic elements were off-shored. It worked well for the 1/2/ 1%. At the same time, the powers that be…terrified by the black vote enabled by the Civil Rights Act, invented the whole “Pro-Life Movement”, and the newest generation of evangelical preachers eagerly latched on.

        Hec…Marx nailed it when he spoke of falling rates of return on capital

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      • I believe the general issue dates back at least to the Civil War. We had a culturally-distinct nation-within-a-nation making up about a third of the total population — ultra-religious, racist, fiercely ignorant, and generally opposed to progress and modern values as they evolved. We still basically have that, even though it’s evolved somewhat and metastasized throughout the country. A little over half a century ago the Republican party set out to recruit and co-opt them, and has now been mostly taken over by them.

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          • Thanks Basenjibrian, for the recommendation and the link. I have to say, that the blog post about the book was a bit strange. Sara Robinson wrote: “…the historical fact remains that the English were here first. And that simple primacy gave them the power all pioneers have to frame the national discussion, and establish the baseline society with which all later arrivals will have to negotiate if they’re to find their place.” Before that she speaks about all the other immigrant groups and she goes on afterwards to explain, how those groups fitted in to the English already established groups. Among those she mentions the Native Americans, wich I suppose is an attempt to be inclusive, but raises a question, that is it endemic to the US culture, to see the British immigrants to the American soil as the first people there and to see the Native Americans only as an outsider group that moved in, like the Scandinavians (whom she also mentions in the list of others joining the British). I guess, her reference is to the birth of the USA as a country, but that happened a lot later and there were no areas where the Native Americans did not already inhabit. Besides, the native nations had complex social structures, religions, art, culture and technology before any immigrants came. Why is that not represented anywhere?

            The one thing about western movies genre I have noticed is, that there are no movies about how the Native Americans lived before the whiteys came along. Even though the natives had different cultures from hunter gatherers to farmers and even mighty cities for thousands of years. Little of their written history has survived, but their cultures existed and we know quite a lot about them. Nothing in the public arena or popular culture – the absolute silence is fascinating, frightning and a bit revealing. Even the Hollywood movie Pathfinder ( it is an expensive but silly copy of a Norvegian film by the same name set in Lapland), that sets itself a thousand years ago in North America has to tell a story, not about the natives, but about the “white” vikings landing there and even though the vikings represent evil conquerors in the movie, the hero still has to also be a “white” dude, no matter how artificial it turns the story out to be. The hero is one of the vikings who takes the side of the underdog natives, but who -for some reason- really is a “white” man. Why?

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        • The problem might actually date even further back and be international in it’s nature. The ideal of “manifest destiny” was born out of moral problem allready existing, wich was the right of might to take the land of the Native American people. To explain such injustice, there needs to be an ideal for some greater good or indeed manifest and unawoidable destiny. Most of the immigrants from generation to generation moving to the Americas have done so out of pressure to move from their homes. For some it has been taken into slavery, to others famine, war and persecution. It is easy to convince desperate people, that they need to fight for the land to live on and to subdue the weaker opposition of people who have lived there before. The real beneficiaries however, are rarely the people who have to do the fighting. Rather it is the rich owners who gain more, while having the poor to fight each other for scraps. The winners in the fight between the poor will call themselves the “middle class” for spending lend money on some items they really do not even need and the rest on what everybody needs, the poorest people, the losers, can not afford, no matter how much they labour.

          Look at Israel! The one people who have suffered the most terrible oppression in the hands of racists, now use their newfound strength to oppress the Palestinians and haven’t we all heard the same excuses before. To the immigrant Israelites, their land was given to them by a god, the Palestinians who oppose their land being stolen are savages and terrorists, their previous suffering provides the Israelites the right and even that because they are somehow more “white”, than the Palestinians, it makes all the injustice they conduct OK. It was not long ago, when an Israeli minister made a comment to that effect. The might makes it possible for some people to just march in and take what once belonged to others and despite all their religiosity, they do not feel they have sold their “soul” in the process. There is no attempt to reconciliate as long as it is possible for the less weak to steal from their weaker parties. At the same time some extremely rich people, such as Ariel Sharon make fortunes on the desperation created by the situation. The Palestinians lose their small land holdings to the illegal Israeli colonies protected by the Israeli army and Israeli companies abuse and exploit the Palestinians practically as a slave labour, while the Palestinian people are confined to the Ghettoes, not much different from those created by the Nazies in Europe for the Jewish people.

          For a nother reference, here in Finland our most western part of the country benefited greatly economically during the era of colonialism, because they sold tarr to make the great fleets of Britain, France and Spain to sail the high seas. As a result and for that brief moment of few generations in history, in that area of Finland almost anybody could hope for an economic growth. All you needed to do, was some initial capital and hard labour in the woods, to produce the sought after product of tarr.

          When ships turned out to be built out of steel and rigging turned into engines, the tarr business died slowly out. The result was not an economic crisis, for most of those who had climbed high enough on the economic ladder and they persisted on the culture and values of the capitalists, that they were. They were well respected for their success in the society and they told everybody, that if someone is not as succesfull as them, it is because the less fortunate ones are not god favourites, because they are lazy. The poor who did not suffer from an economic crisis either, as they had nothing to lose, believed this lie, and turned to Jesus en masse. All sorts of cults and evangelical movements sprang forth from the ground in the area.

          When Fascim was a new and fashionable ideal, this was the area of Finland that fell in love of the new movement. At the same time they were the most religious, evangelical, conservative and creationist in the country but also embraced cultural darvinism, as a fine explanation why the “strong” should rule over the “weak”, and how competition is the real meaning of human life. From their geographical position of living behind the backs of the rest of the Finns, they were the most eager to go on a campaign against the godless heathen of Soviet Union and conquer norther Russia all the way to the Urals. I am not kidding, that is what they told the rest of us.

          Today, that area still holds the notion of anybody being able to raise themselves from the bootstraps as a cultural value and competitiveness as a most highly regarded virtue. That is, of course only, if god wills it and that the person is ready for terrible labour. They have the loudest mouths for self promotion in our otherwise fairly modest culture. They are the most eager to complain about taxes, even in times when the rest of the country is actually supporting them. If someone who has laboured hard, but still fails, it just has to be their own fault – or possibly that of the government. It is the most religious part of the country, but it is also the area where there are more people who do not let their children be vaccinated and where measles sometimes breaks out, even though it has been eradicated from the rest of the country. Is the comparrison clear?

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          • OK … now I have to caution you, rautakyy, as I have done with tildeb.

            This post was about a physician’s experiences through the pandemic. Your comments, while enlightening, have no relationship to the post topic. I realize that what Brian (basenjibrian) wrote probably got you started, but in the future please try to stay on-topic or I will have to moderate your remarks.

            Thanks.

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    • Essentially my words, meaning, implications as well Anne. It deeply disappoints me that this country genuinely believes it has been “More great, the Best” than it has the most embarrassing, idiotic, militant (i.e. spending), delusional brain-farts that we’ve now become the last 4-5 decades. 😔

      I do NOT want to live in this country (much less my home state of Texas) anymore!!! I want out! I can think of AT LEAST 5-6 other countries I’d be a naturalized citizen of in a heart-beat!

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  9. And the worst is yet to come! I am absolutely convinced most voting in November will be by mail because by that time the pandemic in this country will be at full strength. Dr. Osterholm predicted that by November 70% of our population will be infected, and we can expect up to two million dead. And I believe that is exactly what Trump and his fellow murderers want. Why?

    Even Trump can see that his chances for re-election grow slimmer by the day. So, once he loses, as he probably will, he can scream as loudly as possible that it was rigged, and he will not recognize the winner and proclaim himself President elect by default. Just saying it makes my stomach hurt.

    There’s no turning back. We are changed, but to what I don’t know. As the doctor said, and thank you Nan, for this incredible post, when the medical team goes down, we all go down with them.

    I agree with mistermuse, I’d really like to see Trump infected with the Corona virus. I don’t want him to die, can’t wish death on him, but I would like to see him suffer, as he had made so many others suffer. I’d also like for him to stay alive so he can be tried for crimes against humanity–along with McConnell, Graham, Jordon, Nunez, Rubio and all the other Republican enablers.

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  10. It’s funny, in a way that with all the technology available this cannot be controlled and yet there are still individuals who whine about their ”freedom.”

    I think we can be grateful for the technology and the healthcare people we do have as we could well be looking at another Spanish Flu type scenario.
    And maybe that is still on the cards?

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  12. Hello Nan. Several people mentioned the families of the healthcare workers. I know from personal experience that the healthcare workers are very worried about bringing it home to their families. When Ron was working in the ICU caring for Covid patients he and his co-workers had procedures for trying to make them self as sanitized as possible before leaving the hospital, they did not stop anywhere on their way home, and all of them including Ron set things up at home to again reduce any chances of giving it to family. In our home Ron went so far as to place his uniforms / anything he was wearing in a trash bag, and he washed those things himself. I am very grateful Ron is not in healthcare right now. Hugs

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    • My landlady is in health care, She is certainly worried, and her employer, a local county health agency, does not seem very concerned about their health.

      At this point, I am completely fatalistic. Especially since Covid apparently does not result in any lasting immunity and this may be permanent wave after wave after wave of infections. Like the common cold, which is also a COVID virus. And people get colds multiple times per year in some unlucky cases. I cannot live like that-permanently cowering in my rental room spraying everything I have with disinfectant.

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      • Hello basenjibrian. The human species has been around roughly 200,000 to 300,000 in one form or another. During that time we have been in an arms race of things that want to kill us, and that we want to kill or survive from. While we seem to be under a large shadow now and we need to take measures many hate, we can over time recover and gain defences from this. If you look at history even the most deadly pandemics, the worst diseases to hit humans we suffered a lot of death, but then we learned as we fought back. One interesting thing is the medical advancements developed by the HIV / AIDS research. We are much farther along this time because we did not have to start from scratch on developing ideas and procedures. We will win, the countries in Europe and Asia show we can. I think New Zealand just announced it self covid free. But we have to be willing to follow the medical guidelines and take the pain now. Hugs

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      • Basen, is your immunity seriously compromised. If not. I think you can get out. If possible, take a long walk in nature every day. Meditate. I understand that we should not be foolish and not take reasonable precautions. I don’t think this is all a hoax by any means, but I don’t feel as if we’re being faced with Ebola or the Bubonic plague either folks. Because of the wide prevalence of asymptomatic cases in the general population, I’ve read estimates that the general death rate is between .5 and 1 percent. It’s serious, but not an automatic death sentence. I feel like as long as folks wear their masks and socially distance when appropriate, most really will be ok. And, we need to go the extra mile to protect the more vulnerable. But, at the end of the day I’m feeling very hopeful and optimistic. This will also pass in one way or another. High hopes for a vaccine.

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        • Oh Becky, your “uplifting” comment is so reminiscent of your “faith.” Things will all get better soon because … “God.”

          It’s apparent the reasons you’re feeling hopeful and optimistic is because you believe this pandemic will soon be “all over with” and we can all go back to “normal” living. All I can say to you and others who believe similarly, don’t count on it.

          Further, people can quote “statistics” related to the death rate all day long, but if you (or a loved one) begins experiencing symptoms and tests “positive,” those statistics will mean zilch … nada … zip. All that will matter at that point will be whether or not your case turns out to be mild … or not.

          Yes, we are ALL hoping for a proven and tested vaccine to become available … but contrary to what certain individuals claim, it is still a long ways off. Until then … don’t get caught up in the theories that proclaim it’s not as bad as it seems. Continue to take precautions and most of all, remember the message in this post.

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          • Don’t count on the vaccine, Nan. The common cold is also a COVID virus. Scientists are increasingly concerned that there is no lasting immunity associated with COVID and vaccines may be very difficult and ineffective. Even with vaccines and relentless “get your flu shots” in the media, the flu kills thousands each year.

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          • Also: re: Becky. Her God allowed (he IS sovereign, isn’t he? So He is responsible, ultimately, for all the horrors imposed on humanity) 1/3 – 1/2 of the European population, a population much more (superficially) devout than the modern age, to be killed by the Plague. Why should we trust this awful, malevolent…God…to save us from COVID? I have the opposite reaction. I like John Zande’s conception of TOOAMN, The Owner of All Malevolent Names, as a better conception for Yahweh than the blather of His partisans. This has been your Misotheism Moment for the week, folks! 🙂

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        • No, covid-19 is certainly not like ebola. If memory serves, ebola killed a grand total of two people in the US before being contained and eliminated, by far less drastic measures than we’ve had to adopt for covid-19 — which has nevertheless killed almost 140,000 Americans with no end in sight. So no, there is no comparison between the magnitude of the two threats.

          Similarly, bubonic plague is a bacterial disease, far easier for modern medical technology to cope with than a viral disease like covid-19. So deaths from bubonic plague in modern countries are very rare and outbreaks are easily controlled. Again, no comparison our current problem.

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        • I know, Rebecca. I am not necessarily locking myself at home. I may be too blithe about it, in fact. Partly fatalism.

          My hobby…sport…OBSESSION is long distance recreational cycling, so if anything the pandemic enables that because I am working from home and automobile traffic levels are (still) below pre-Covid levels. So I have opportunities to ride more, if anything.

          I wear a mask in enclosed situations but on a rural road, no way. I don’t buy the assurances that masks are easy and not an issue-they are very uncomfortable to me, or should be if you are wearing them correctly. I would say there were a couple of nerve wracking situations, and observing entire high school cross country teams running mask-less on a path the other day will mean I probably avoid that connecting route in the future. Still…wearing a mask when riding by oneself…nope. Especially if one is a casual rider not wearing a helmet or visible clothing RIDING THE WRONG WAY DOWN A MAIN STREET DURING RUSH HOUR. Grrrr. “Salmoning” (riding “upstream”) is one of my major pet peeves as a cyclist, and it is always Generation Z kids and the homeless who seem unable to follow basic, courtesy rules.,

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    • Thank you, Sixpence. I think we need to do all we can to spotlight our healthcare workers as often as possible. This pandemic has put them into situations where even their lives are in danger. Precautions or not, this virus is insidious.

      Stay safe. And please … wear a mask.

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  15. This is a thought-provoking post. Very very sad to hear how this doctor is feeling, and I’m sure his colleagues are just as tired. It’s an awful situation that did not have to be and we have only one person to blame. I wish I had skills that could be used in hospitals.

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  16. A comment on another site brought out one thing we should not lose site of: Trump is the culmination, the result, the inevitable end point of 40+ years of American free market fundamentalist policy. Naked Capitalism has interesting coverage that, although I guess one might attribute it to the “left wing trump” movement, not everything they are doing is immediate bad. And Trump inherited an already decimated medical system, as the final notes on this interesting essay on data aggregation points out:

    https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/07/hysteria-ensues-as-trump-administration-orders-hospitals-to-send-covid-19-data-to-hhs-not-the-cdc.html

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  17. Dr. Peluso: “If you find you need us in 6 to 10 weeks, I hope we will still be able to care for you and we won’t be taking up those ICU beds with our own sick bodies.”

    Zoe: I imagine we can’t comprehend the number of hospital staff that have had Covid &/or died as a result. As well, the long-term consequences physically and emotionally will leave a mark.

    Every single day I think about hospital staff and the conditions they work in. I remember my exhaustion as an O.R. and Recovery Rm. nurse. I simply cannot fathom how they are doing it . . . or wait, I can. Humans are capable of great strength and resilience. However, we are not machines and I have a sense of remembering being a machine myself just to get through a day, a weekend, or a week of high stress at work. It is nothing compared to these warriors. We don’t have an endless supply of stress hormones.

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    • Every single day I think about hospital staff and the conditions they work in.

      Compassionate and caring people consider these things. Those that proclaim their freedom is more important than taking precautions against the virus don’t spend even one micro-second thinking about anyone but themselves.

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