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Last week, millions of Americans came together in total disregard of all public health advice over another round of infections and killings of their loved ones, while ensuring that health professionals nationwide were facing several months of risky, grueling and emotionally draining work. keep alive a country full of reckless jerks and gullible conspirators.
Many doctors, nurses and hospital staff are increasingly desperate and disillusioned. No more 7 o’clock cheers and “Thank You Essential Workers” signs in every window. This fleeting solidarity has been replaced by a cold and selfish indifference to the astonishing and seemingly unnecessary sacrifices these heroic workers continue to make on our behalf. And many of them wonder how much longer they can go on.
Never has it been so clear as it was over the Thanksgiving long weekend. While many Americans have done the sane thing – albeit heartbreaking – and stayed home or limited their gatherings to preexisting little “pods”, more than a million people walked through airports on Thanksgiving eve. In a poll, 40% of respondents told researchers they were planning to attend a large meeting in person. All this while a record 90,000 people were already hospitalized with COVID-19 and public health professionals begged people to stay home so as not to make the problem worse.
How can people do this, knowing that their actions risk their own lives and the lives of others? It would be one thing if the incredible global scientific effort to create a vaccine against this terrible virus failed and there was no hope on the dark horizon. But it looks like several vaccines will be rolled out starting next month, with the possibility of a return to some sort of normality by May. The end of this thing is now enticing in sight.
This is not to downplay what people have gone through, nor the misery that awaits those who curl up for the winter, still cruelly deprived of almost all social contact and ordinary joys. This is not about dismissing the agony of those who have lost jobs and businesses, without any help from their government since the summer. It has all been a nightmare, and I am one of those extremely lucky professionals who have been able to keep their jobs and work from home with my family.
But the reality is that many Americans are now consciously choosing to spread death and suffering rather than finding the strength to endure a few more months. And they’re not just hurting themselves: they’re putting unimaginable pressure on the nation’s healthcare system, as exhausted doctors, nurses and staff wonder why they are martyring themselves in the name of such a venal society.
You do not believe me? If you have friends or relatives who work in the health field, ask them how they are doing. I contacted some of the healthcare professionals in my network and the responses were sobering. “Many of my colleagues (including myself),” said a pediatrician friend, “have seen their faith in humanity irreparably damaged by the response of our compatriots to this challenge.” A viral immunologist told me, “I feel angry with these people because this will inevitably cause more death and damage and not just to them but to others who have stayed home and followed directions. . ” He added that much of the responsibility lies with national and state political leaders determined to downplay the seriousness of the problem so that they can rush economic reopenings. A palliative care medical advisor said staff at his facility “are wonderful but furious when it is the reckless behavior of patients that puts them in intensive care for COVID.” Fury gives way to exhaustion and resignation. “They always provide superhuman care,” she said, “but it’s only human to be frustrated”.
Don’t know anyone who works in the field? Jump online and watch the dozens of medical professionals screaming into the abyss about the horrors inflicted on them. There is the nurse who, knowing what awaits her in the months to come, decided to isolate himself of her little one for the duration. “This is what I have to give up,” she wrote plaintively, “so that these horribly selfish people can go to their grandmother and infect her with Covid. Then they will take him to my hospital.
There is the doctor who writes that, “I am moved and terrified by what I see in the COVID ICU… What is happening in many states across the country is like the Titanic.”
There’s the South Dakota nurse whose thread on COVID patients presenting to intensive care, still believing quite a hoax has gone viral. “These people really don’t think this will happen to them,” she said. “And then they stop yelling at you when they’re intubated.”
Health workers are not in the military. No one is forcing them to dress and dive into another 16-hour shift to watch a deadly virus choke people to death. There is no law that says they must continue even when COVID patients show up, convinced it was all a conspiracy to harm President Trump’s re-election prospects. Healthcare providers are well aware that many of the patients they treat laughed at the danger and ignored expert guidance and did whatever they wanted anyway.
This type of behavior is bad, selfish, and cartoonish destructive. It fills me with incoherent rage. It is a country full of people who have completely lost their way. One of the most infuriating things about this is that the selfish actions of your friends and neighbors will serve to thwart the sacrifices of those who have spent the past 9 months trying to do the right thing.
This means that your friends, relatives and grandparents could be infected with this disease and die from it, all because millions of your wacky fellow citizens clearly lacked the courage to overcome temporary adversity, and because the ghouls depraved currently in charge of the federal government refused to spend the money necessary to help the riskiest places – bars, restaurants and gyms – to remain closed and financially whole. You can blame President Trump for his senseless culture wars and his callous message of “don’t let him rule your life” for whatever you want, but these are words that shouldn’t have resonated with capable sane citizens at all. to guess the difference between truth and fiction, to think for themselves instead of disappearing into a mad hole every time they open a post on Facebook.
We now know where this is heading over the next few months. Hospitals will be taxed beyond their capacity, increasing the death rate from COVID and delaying or canceling care for tens of thousands more. There will be mobile mortuaries and mass graves and countless Zoom funerals and a whole generation of healthcare workers suffering from ongoing emotional trauma. People will come to the emergency room after car crashes, heart attacks, and allergic reactions and die while waiting. The overall coronavirus death toll, now at more than 266,000, will surpass 400,000 or more by March and could eventually reach half a million or more. The economic benefits could last for years.
Much of this suffering will ultimately have been unnecessary. Tens of thousands of people will perish weeks or even days before they can be saved. More and more frontline workers will succumb. And all because so many of our fellow citizens have turned out to be both pathetic and decadent. It really is hard to believe that the millions of people who are too weak to go a year without sitting down for a meal in a restaurant are the descendants of the brave men and women who fought and won World War II with five years of sacrifice. painful and solidarity.
Many Americans around 2020 would not have spent three weeks after Pearl Harbor before protesting rationing and demanding our surrender to the Axis Powers, and they do not deserve our sympathy or the extraordinary heroism of doctors, nurses and hospital and care staff. homes across the country.
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