Realize everything you have touched between the store and home (your car door handle, your steering wheel) is potentially contaminated. touched between the store and home (your car door handle, your steering wheel) is potentially contaminated. We watched the movie Outbreak a couple weeks ago, and there is a scene in a movie theater where the sick guy coughs and it shows all the particles aerosolized and traveling through the theater and into the mouth of someone laughing nearby, onto the armrest where someone else lays their hand... It’s disgusting but a REALLY good illustration of what is happening... Picture that whenever you go out! Realistically, how long do you think this will last? I think COVID-19 is with us for good. It will become a virus most have been exposed to so immunity will exist in the population, and we’ll hopefully have a vaccine for it, maybe even antivirals. It won’t continue to have the kind of impact it does now as a novel virus, but it won’t disappear. How long will this need to societal shut-down last? Depends on so many things... You can see how slowly things are happening. The outbreak in Washington, NYC is getting hit hard now, slowly spreading to NJ, other major cities like New Orleans are getting their uptick, so it’s a kind of slow roll through the country. We have cases here, the curve is flatter, which is a success, but you see how that flat curve extends further...
be thankful for our families, and even reach out to help people who need it. NewYork is being hit particularly hard right now. Is your hospital prepared if those kinds of numbers hit here? I think my hospital is prepared to handle that kind of peak in our community, not necessarily NYC numbers because we don’t serve that dense of a population... but a relative surge in cases for our community. Again, we have the advantage of not being one of the first cities hit in this country. The amount of sharing of information through listserves, publications, even social media (like the EM Physicians group) has been incredible. The medical community has understood what’s coming, I think, long before it became general knowledge with full media coverage... So we are ready. This doesn’t mean the hospital itself can fit everyone. We have surge plans for other facilities for overflow, tents are already up in the parking lots, and you’ve probably heard that the convention center downtown is an option for overflow. We are planning, planning, planning. Hopefully our social changes and different population density mean we don’t ever get there... But if you’re not prepared for it, it’s definitely going to happen! What should people do to keep themselves safe? Stay home. When you have to go to the store to stock up, try to minimize those visits, touch only what you’re buying, assume everything you touch is coated in virus, and wash your hands immediately when you get home. And realize everything you have
American Consequences
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