Date: 2024-10-19 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00021420
US HEALTH
COVID PANDEMIC
Umair Haque ... America’s Approach to Omicron Is Insane ... Through a Combination of Incompetence, Ineptitude, and Indifference, Americas’s Bungling Covid Yet Again
COVID PANDEMIC
Umair Haque ... America’s Approach to Omicron Is Insane ... Through a Combination of Incompetence, Ineptitude, and Indifference, Americas’s Bungling Covid Yet Again
Image Credit: CNN Screenshot
Original article: https://eand.co/americas-approach-to-omicron-is-insane-c909e742017f
Burgess COMMENTARY
Thank you, Umair, for penning this piece. I don't want to give the Biden administration a free pass, but I don't want to demonize this administration's performance in a destructive manner. The USA is faced with a very difficult situation with many different dysfunctions most of which have a quite long history. This piece is a reminder of the sad reality that the socio-enviro-economic system in the USA has a quite appalling level of dysfunction, most of which cannot be fixed quickly by any administration, let alone an administration that has little or no wiggle-room in the Legislative branch of the Federal Government let alone the Judiciary and the multitude of State Governments which have considerable day to day responsibility for the operation of everything. Umair has described an important problem, but the solution is anything but simple.
Peter Burgess
WRITTEN BY Umair Haque
December 23rd 2021
My lovely wife works at one of America’s finest hospitals. It’s a household name. Say it, anywhere, to anyone, and they’ll smile in appreciation and admiration. But it hasn’t done anything to protect its employees from Omicron.
One of my wife’s researchers got an email this morning saying he was at risk of contracting Omicron — he was asymptomatic, but he had tested positive for Omicron, yet only with a saliva test . The email? It didn’t recommend quarantining, isolating, bubbling. It didn’t outline symptoms to look out for or how to practice self-care. It didn’t even talk about anything remotely concerned with healthcare. Instead, the email talked about a “failure to comply” and “punishment” if he didn’t get another test — a PCR test — within 24 hours.
The email was punitive.
The researcher — a 22 year old kid — was a) panicked and b) baffled. He called my wife, crying, because he’d been just about to leave to see his family. The email had scared him more than the positive test — now it felt like his own job was after him, punishing him, placing the onus of getting ill on him. And this was one of America’s finest hospitals.
He understood that he had to get a test, but how? Covid tests are — unbelievably — in short supply in America. He began to call the hospital’s various numbers. One after the other. Sorry, no tests here. Nope, sorry, kid — can’t help you. Nobody apparently had the foresight to stockpile Covid tests — because, until last week, everyone from pundits to major hospitals said they weren’t needed and that the pandemic was ending.
The researcher — a 22 year old kid — is sitting in his apartment, frightened out of his wits, because even though he works at one of America’s finest hospitals, nobody has protected him from Covid.
He’s left to fend for himself. And isn’t that the theme of American life?
My wife is taking a break from being a doctor. She burned out three times since the pandemic began. While people were growing “weary” and “angry” with lockdowns, she saw person after person — hundreds? She stopped counting after a couple of months — literally suffocate and choke to death. She saw them beg for another breath. For another moment. She watched them in disbelief that, yes, they’d come in perfectly healthy 24–48 hours ago, and now they were drawing their very last breaths or had already passed when she would go with the team to do their ward round. Then she had to tell their families that their mother, brother, sister, father wasn’t here anymore. And deal with their grief and shock.
All that — and we both knew another wave was coming, just as anyone remotely scientifically literate did. Meanwhile, governments acted like the pandemic was “over.”
So she’s taking a break. Helping with something slightly different for a year. Still trying to do something noble and right and good, despite the stupidity and folly she saw — lived through. Then Omicron hit.
Everyone on her team could have worked from home 90% of the time. Guess who did? Nobody. Why not? Because, well, it’s America. Americans “love” to work, they say. More accurate is to say that they’re forced into it. Even if and when they don’t want to, even when their lives are at risk — sorry, who cares, it’s not about you, it’s about your job.
Hence, her researcher getting Covid. If this institution — one of America’s finest hospitals — had really cared about preventing a new wave of a deadly pandemic…why wasn’t everyone who could working from home, the second we all knew Omicron would hit? Because America’s institutions don’t care about anything but “productivity” and work and money. Healthcare in America, remember, is a business. Hence, everybody was ordered into work instead of working from home, right as a new wave of a pandemic hit.
When she started work there she asked where the PPE and masks were since they would leave the office to see patients on research visits. The research assistants told her there were none and that none had been provided for them. One said he couldn’t afford to buy surgical masks every week and so was re-using them. The ventilation had not been changed in their building either; windows didn’t open and no HEPA filters anywhere. Essentially a perfect place for the virus to spread unchecked.
America’s finest hospital who’s tracking the whole pandemic couldn’t even be bothered to put air filters in its buildings or provide healthcare researchers with basic PPE. They can put out memes on Twitter but god forbid they actually look out for their employees. What stupidity. What indifference. Everybody on her team was desperate. I was desperate. Sweetheart, I said, pleading. Can’t you work from home? I really don’t want you to get sick. You’re just doing statistics and crunching numbers anyways. It doesn’t make sense! She’d shrug, and smile. She’s far better — braver and nobler — than me. I’d simmer in rage at the senselessness of it all. She bought masks and PPE for the office because she felt she had a duty to take care of the people she supervises.
She saved my life once. What would I do if I lost her? Ah. There I was. Feeling the violence and brutality of a pandemic. Fear rippled through me. She was a doctor in Europe. There, even now, people are working from home. Societies have gone back into lockdown. Precautions and measures have been taken — at lightning speed. Even if, like in Britain, it’s not quite enough, at least some kind of precautions are being taken.
But this? This is America. Literally nothing happened. Nobody lifted a finger to stop a new wave of a pandemic we all knew was coming. Biden didn’t order lockdowns — he didn’t even order tests until it was too late. And so it did what it always going to do. It exploded.
My wife, like millions of Americans, was trapped — having to go a job she didn’t have to do in an office. Her researcher, like millions of other Americans, was trapped, having gotten sick, and then having the onus and burden of being ill placed on him, essentially being punished by his workplace. Meanwhile, thanks to incompetent leadership — government, medical establishment, everyone, more or less — they can’t even get tested.
This was at America’s finest hospital. How much worse is it for people who aren’t lucky enough to work there?
What a disaster. What stupidity.
My story, though, is far from over.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve known it was going to happen. That she’d get sick, that her whole team would, because nobody was letting them work from home, while at the social level, nobody was taking steps to stop a pandemic from landing on American shores yet again.
And now my life went into a twilight zone. I needed, I realized, to get boosted. But I wasn’t in Europe. I was in America this year. And I had a very, very bad feeling about this. As it turned out, I was right. Something incredible proceeded to happen. I couldn’t get boosted, no matter how hard I tried.
The first time I tried, I booked an appointment at the drugstore nearby. I waited in line for two hours. Two long hours at a dingy little drugstore — perfectly nice town, but in America, because everything is run for maximum profit, this place doesn’t even have decent lighting. We — the unboosted — were shunted to aisle twenty, with the feminine hygiene products, in an unsubtle bit of misogyny. There we waited, among the tampons and maxi-pads.
Meanwhile, the “vaccination center” consisted of two curtains on a pole strung across the back of the aisle. No precautions, no privacy, no dignity, no nothing. Fine, I sighed. Finally, I got to the head of the line. “Sir, I can’t boost you,” some rando barked at me.” Why not, I asked half-heartedly, knowing something would go wrong. This was America, after all. “It hasn’t been six months since…”
Uh oh. America and its dumb rules. They always exist to punish you for no good reason — never to help you, aid you, care for you. And now I was squarely in the crosshairs of one of these dumb rules.
I looked at the guy. A decent enough fellow. But, like a Soviet before him, obsessed with rules like Americans are today. I tried explaining to him the facts. How we all needed boosters, how being double vaccinated didn’t protect you much anymore, how it had literally been 5.5 months so I would be eligible anyway within the next 2 weeks. He gave me the blank, indifferent look Americans in positions of authority are famous for. “Next!”
So there I was. I was trying to get the booster that everyone in power — Biden and Fauci and all the rest — were begging me to get. Only I couldn’t get one, because of their rules. I went home. I explained to my wife. She was shocked. She quickly looked up the similar rules in other countries. Britain? Three months. France? Four. Holland? Three. And so forth. America’s the only country in the rich world — probably the one period — where the rule, even in the middle of a vaccine-resistant wave of a pandemic, is six months or no booster.
Nobody in power has checked that rule. Even thought about it. CDC, hospitals, President, task force. Nobody. Nobody’s changed it, understood it. Not a single person has connected the dots and said, hey, vaccines lose their efficacy fast, and we want everyone to get boosted, so maybe we should make it happenv.
Do you see what an incredible level of institutional and government failure this is? Not to even think about the science? To keep a policy that’s now in stark opposition to the science? How many millions of Americans are in the same boat as me? A very large number, I’d bet. I wasn’t vaccinated super late. Just in the mid summer. And I can’t get a booster.
So I asked around. My friends laughed and told me to go to a drugstore in a poorer neighborhood, with laxer rules. I tried. No dice. My gold-plated health insurance? They won’t even talk about it. I must have spent something like a whole day — 24 hours — over the last week trying to get a booster. I can’t get one.
I went home and wrote to the CDC. It’s been a week. No reply.
So here I am.
I’m not boosted, because I can’t get the booster the President and his team and the Surgeon General and so on keep begging me to get. It’s like something out of a Joseph Heller novel. They don’t seem to care that their policies are totally backwards and in opposition to science. My wife’s whole team has Covid, and nobody lifted a finger to stop it or even help them manage it, even though they work at America’s finest hospital. And now we’re both sick.
Us? We’re still better off than most Americans. We’re lucky and fortunate. But if it’s this bad for us, how bad is it for the average person?
What’s the moral of the little story I’ve told you?
America’s approach to Covid is catastrophically insane. It is laced with deadly incompetence. Woven through with institutional indifference. Irresponsibility colours it. It seems that at this point, nothing matters and nobody cares. Even America’s finest institutions leave you vulnerable. Americans have to work through pandemics. Nobody locks down, and social distancing and masking are optional. The President is out to lunch, the Surgeon General doesn’t have a clue about what the average person is facing. Policies are left in opposition to science, because no one is on the ball, keeping them updated. Basic deficits of public health goods from tests to lockdowns are the norm.
It is not like this in the rest of the rich world.
None of this would have happened to us in Europe or even Canada. None of it. My wife’s little researcher wouldn’t be having a panic attack in his apartment because his institution, one of the nation’s finest hospitals, was punishing him…for getting sick…with the disease…it didn’t help stop. My wife would have been able to work from home. Me? I would have been boosted months ago.
Society would have had lockdowns. Distancing. Masks wouldn’t be optional. Vaccination rates would be higher, and sickness and death rates much lower.
America’s approach to Covid is catastrophically insane. It is made of incompetence, indifference and stupidity verging on negligence and malice.
I wonder if Americans get it.
We were looking forward to a happy Christmas. We’ll still try to have one. I cough into my coffee. The puppy looks up. Dad, are you OK? Don’t worry, little guy, I say. This is America. It’s everyone — but you and me — for themselves.
WRITTEN BY umair haque
December 2021
Eudaimonia & Co