My 3/11/2020 Post
3/11/2020
So here we are. On the verge of how to best support our herd.
1. If you are asked to self quarantine, you do it. You don't sneak out to your daughter's dance because she really wants to go, you stay home. Social distancing has data to support it. It is a real thing. Look it up.
2. You stay calm and don't show up to your doctor's office for a swab because you want to know what virus is making your nose run. Knowing that it is our regular old coronavirus or rhinovirus or humanmetapneumovirus vs the new strain that is SARs CoV2 causing COVID-19 doesn't matter.
3. ABC's matter. Airway, Breathing, Circulation. If your symptoms wouldn't take you to the MD or ED last year- that shouldn't change. Don't fill waiting rooms and risk either being infected, being a barrier to someone else's healthcare or frankly- killing someone else.
4. Hygiene is in. Wash your hands. Keep your fingers away from your face. Cough into your sleeve. Wash your hands after you blow your nose and throw away the tissue. Clean under your nails and in between your fingers.
5. Communal cups, public sampling platters, candy baskets need a time out. Give them a good wash and put the trays and decorative bowls away. No one ever wanted a bin of jellybeans laced with norovirus. (I still am more scared of norovirus than coronavirus)
6. Don't visit the nursing home with even a sniffle. Don't visit the hospital with one either. Facetime, call, write a letter. Wash your hands after you arrive. Protect our most vulnerable. Stay home sick.
7. Regarding international travel- we have been looking at travel from a very US centric standpoint - what could we pick-up from overseas? We wouldn't want to bring something back; we wouldn't want to infect our loved ones and we certainly don't have time for a travel quarantine. But now we have it in the US. Don't risk creating a patient zero elsewhere in the world. Let it die with you. Protect the herd.
8. For goodness sake can we finally talk about dying in the US? We all will die. We know that and yet we cannot figure out how to talk about it? Talk to your loved ones about what they might want if they are that one patient who ends up needing a ventilator. Do you want it? What does that look like? Talk to your doctor-- they have some skills and can advise. Take some time during this Festivus of coronavirus to read Atul Gawande's Being Mortal. We are obviously scared as a species. We also seem to have a lot of down time to listen to the media. And we didn't notice the 80k who died from the flu last year, let alone the number who died from other respiratory viral illnesses last year. Now you know it is a real thing. Now you see them. It happens. Please talk. It will make our work better.
9. I am still not worried about this virus. I am still way more scared of the herd, than the virus. I still assume that I will get it. I know there are those of you that might think that I am cold-hearted about people dying. Or in denial about this pandemic. THIS virus is not the one that worries me. But I am embracing the chance to see what we can do, to see if we might finally realize how fortunate we are to be gifted bodies that are vulnerable. In ID we see things that happen- things you couldn't recreate if you tried. The wrong bug (bacteria) at the wrong time in the wrong place (insert lung, leg, brain) in the infectious world kills daily. And then there is our health, the things we can control-- we don't take care of ourselves. We eat junk, we take pills, we worship nicotine, we don't sleep or exercise. We stress ourselves to death. So maybe it is going to be a virus, a mediocre virus - that helps us slow down? Look out for one another? Protect our vulnerable? Remember why vaccines and antibiotics were so celebrated when they were discovered? Get us to value funding more ID and fewer bombs? That would be worth it.
