Has Achieved Nirvana
| I'll have to verify the stat when I re-watch the segment I saw this morning. But here's something from the NYT that echoes the point: quote: In 2005, the federal government sought to assess how a respiratory-related pandemic might play out in the United States. Its report estimated that a severe influenza pandemic would require mechanical ventilators for 740,000 critically ill people.
Today, as the country faces the possibility of a widespread outbreak of a new respiratory infection caused by the coronavirus, there are nowhere near that many ventilators, and most are already in use. Only about 62,000 full-featured ventilators were in hospitals across the country, a 2010 study found. More than 10,000 others are stored in the Strategic National Stockpile, a federal cache of supplies and medicines held in case of emergencies, according to Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, a former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Tens of thousands of other respiratory devices could be repurposed in an emergency, experts say, but the shortfall could be stark, potentially forcing doctors to make excruciating life-or-death decisions about who would get such help should hospitals become flooded with the desperately sick.
Much about the coronavirus remains unclear, and it is far from certain that the outbreak will reach severe proportions in the United States or affect many regions at once. With its top-notch scientists, modern hospitals and sprawling public health infrastructure, most experts agree, the United States is among the countries best prepared to prevent or manage such an epidemic.
But the coronavirus, which appeared in China in December and has stricken more than 86,000 people around the world, killing nearly 3,000, has already exposed significant vulnerabilities in the ability of the United States to respond to serious health emergencies.
In plausible worst-case-scenarios given the pattern of the outbreak thus far, the country could experience acute shortages not just in ventilators but also health workers to operate them and care for patients; hospital beds; and masks and other protective equipment.
“Even during mild flu pandemics, most of our I.C.U.s are filled to the brim with severely ill patients on mechanical ventilation,” said Dr. Eric Toner, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an expert on health care preparedness. “I hope and pray Covid-19 turns out to be a moderate pandemic, but if not, we’re in serious trouble,” he said, referring to the name given the disease caused by the virus.
Resources are concentrated in the most populous and wealthiest cities, leaving rural areas and other neglected communities exposed to greater risk. And public health experts worry that efforts to contain an outbreak could be hamstrung by budget cuts that have weakened state health departments.
quote: “The Chinese bought us a month of time to prepare ourselves by imposing these astonishing and draconian measures,” said J. Stephen Morrison, senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which last year issued a report that identified flaws in the nation’s health security. “Unfortunately, we didn’t make good use of that time and now we’re heading into a very dangerous situation.”
quote: Anjali Goel, 18, a New York University student studying in Italy, returned home this past week after the university shut down its campus in Florence. She said she was surprised when a customs officer at Washington Dulles International Airport simply waved her through without asking any questions.
“I expected him to ask me something because I was coming from an infected area,” she said.
For now, Ms. Goel has opted to self-quarantine, just in case. “I’m staying indoors, limiting my interaction with people and checking my temperature,” she said, “even if I am feeling perfectly normal.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/0...n-united-states.html
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We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
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Jodi