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Saturday, March 21, 2020




JUST IN CASE YOU WEREN’T NERVOUS ENOUGH YET
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY WARNER
MARCH 21, 2020


NEW YORK BATTLES THE CORONAVIRUS, AS PROBABLY OTHER CITIES ARE ALSO DOING OR WILL BE SOON. DO WATCH THE EMBEDDED VIDEO “EVERYTHING IS UNCHARTED.”

Coronavirus in N.Y.: ‘Deluge’ of Cases Begins Hitting Hospitals
There are already critical shortages: A Bronx hospital is running out of ventilators. In Brooklyn, doctors are reusing masks.
By Brian M. Rosenthal, Joseph Goldstein and Michael Rothfeld
Published March 20, 2020
Updated March 21, 2020, 7:52 a.m. ET

PHOTOGRAPH -- People waited outside Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens on Friday to be tested for the coronavirus. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

New York State’s long-feared surge of coronavirus cases has begun, thrusting the medical system toward a crisis point.

In a startlingly quick ascent, officials reported on Friday that the state was closing in on 8,000 positive tests, about half the cases in the country. The number was 10 times higher than what was reported earlier in the week.

In the Bronx, doctors at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center say they have only a few remaining ventilators for patients who need them to breathe. In Brooklyn, doctors at Kings County Hospital Center say they are so low on supplies that they are reusing masks for up to a week, slathering them with hand sanitizer between shifts.

Some of the jump in New York’s cases can be traced to significantly increased testing, which the state began this week. But the escalation, and the response, could offer other states a glimpse of what might be in store if the virus continues to spread. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Friday urged residents to stay indoors and ordered nonessential businesses to keep workers home.


Video – ‘Everything Is Uncharted’: New Yorkers Confront Life Amid a Coronavirus Shutdown 0:00/7:29
With restrictions tightened on businesses and daily activity, residents are grappling with uncertainty about resources, health care and their paychecks.CreditCredit...Yousur Al-Hlou/The New York Times

TRANSCRIPT:

“With restrictions tightened on businesses and daily activity, residents are grappling with uncertainty about resources, health care and their paychecks.

“We’re going to put out an executive order today. New York State on pause — only essential businesses will be functioning. 100% of the workforce must stay home. This is the most drastic action we can take.” “Everything is uncharted territory. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in the news any minute.” “I think I’ve been asking a lot of how we could have prevented this.” “Am I going to see another depression like my grandfather saw in the 1920s?” “Over the past few days, New York City has taken a lot of important measures. I’m just worried it came a little bit too late.” [SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE] “I think I’m scared of having to see more death and from reading stories from abroad, having to make decisions about resources. And I’m worried people in my life are going to die from it. A few days ago, I had to watch a patient basically slowly die. I just felt helpless. This is the first time I’ve really seen people that I truly don’t know how to help. And they are coming in so sick that everything I’m used to doing to be able to treat them, I can’t really do.” “How was your day off, Mich?” “It was emotional, to say the least.” “Why?” “It’s just, like, the hospital has been insane. And every hour, like, things are changing. So it’s just, like, trying to keep up with that while trying to read about what I should be treating these people with, while people are rolling in the worst — I don’t know. They say in 18 days it’s supposed to get really bad. I guarantee you tomorrow we’re going to have like 1,000 more. Those numbers are going to go up.”

[MUSIC PLAYING] “That’s no problem at all. Thank you very much. That’s very nice. Thank you. Sounds good. See you then. Bye. Well, I have been working. A lot of people are not, which is hard. This place used to have 30 employees, and on Sunday we let go of 90% of the staff. We want to reopen so we can rehire people, you know? It was really hard to let everyone go. These are people that are at the level, they’re not wealthy, you know? This is a very harsh reality. And actually what the job is, is smiling through stress. And this is hard to smile through.”

[RAIN FALLING] [QUIET PIANO] “It’s go time here at the community kitchen. This is the time where we have to ramp up our services to be very sensitive to how people are feeling. People are coming to us feeling vulnerable. They maybe work in the restaurant industry. People who work in Broadway and in a lot of the behind- the-scenes, they’re coming here saying, well, I don’t have work. So those industries are the folks that are the first ones that we’re seeing come through. But we’re preparing to see more people come through in need.” “All programming at the senior center is suspended for the next two weeks. Stay safe and have a good day.” “So this is not business as usual. We don’t know what’s coming up if people have to stay in their homes for a longer period of time. And we want to make sure people are getting food, especially since a lot of industries are out of work. We are expecting a lot of new people, and we are going to be ready to receive them. This is all very new for them, and some of them are feeling guilt or shame coming to an emergency food program. So we have to remember that we do this all the time, but for them, it’s something new and something that they feel anxious about doing. We’re just getting them registered. They’re getting food. That’s our main priority is people are getting food.” [SIGHING WITH EXASPERATION] “I’m not supposed to touch my face. Hold on a second.”

[MUSIC PLAYING] “I have prepared myself already, mentally, multiple times, to go back to Oregon and leave this entire beautiful dream behind me. So many people, including many of my friends, are working at bars, at restaurants, which are now closed. And now we’re all at home, wondering, Can we make it another month? Can our families afford to pay their mortgages at home? Do we just need to go back and start working, just so we can help our own families, the people that we love the most, stay in the homes that we grew up in? It’s hard to think that my mom or my dad are never going to see retirement. The best things that we can do right now as a community is just to give ourselves over to something that brings us true happiness. Because right now, it feels like it’s about to get very desperate.”

[MUSIC PLAYING] “This is only something that we can get through if we’re working together. There will be so much suffering, unnecessary suffering, if we’re not really looking out for each other and if we only think about ourselves and our well-being. We have to be thinking about each other.” [MUSIC PLAYING] [BIRDS CHIRPING]”


State officials have projected that the number of coronavirus cases in New York will peak in early May. Both the governor and Mayor Bill de Blasio have used wartime metaphors and analogies to paint a grim picture of what to expect. Officials have said the state would need to double its available hospital beds to 100,000 and could be short as many as 25,000 ventilators.

As it prepares for the worst-case projections, the state is asking retired health care workers to volunteer to help. The city is considering trying to turn the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan into a makeshift hospital.

“The most striking part is the speed with which it has ramped up,” said Ben McVane, an emergency room doctor at Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens. “It went from a small trickle of patients to a deluge of patients in our departments.”


LIVE COVERAGE: THE LATEST Read our live coverage of the coronavirus outbreak in the New York area.


At Elmhurst, a 545-bed public hospital that serves a large population of undocumented immigrants and low-income residents, coronavirus patients have begun to crowd out others. Protective gear is running low. Doctors are worried there will be a shortage of ventilators.

Outside the facility, at a tent housing a new mobile-testing site, a line snaked around the building on Friday, a sign of the demand on testing and how much worse the influx could become.

Image -- New York could be short as many as 25,000 ventilators at the peak of the crisis, according to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, second from left. Credit...Cindy Schultz for The New York Times

Demetre Daskalakis, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Health, estimated that hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of city residents would be infected in the outbreak. Officials, however, have said that most people will have mild to moderate symptoms, or none at all.

Generally, about 20 percent of coronavirus patients require hospitalization, with about a quarter of those needing to be put on a mechanical ventilator machine to help them breathe. Statewide, more than 1,200 people have been hospitalized with the virus, according to Mr. Cuomo’s office. About 170 patients were in intensive care units in city hospitals, according to the city.

But even those initial cases were straining the health care system, a worrying sign.

“There’s no reference for this,” said Daniel Singer, who has been an emergency room doctor for 14 years and now works at Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center. “It’s totally unprecedented.”

Lincoln administrators met on Friday to discuss its dwindling supply of ventilators, according to another employee.

LATEST UPDATES -- Read our live global coverage of the coronavirus outbreak.

Dr. Mitchell Katz, the head of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs New York City’s public hospitals, said there were 230 patients in the Elmhurst emergency room on Thursday, about 50 more than any recent peak. Most were patients with the symptoms of Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, he said.

The system has received 100 more ventilators from its supplier and is expecting hundreds more, Dr. Katz said. At the same time, Mr. de Blasio has cast the equipment shortage in stark terms and has asked the federal government for help.

“I don’t mean to be too dramatic here, it’s just a fact,” he said on Friday in an interview with the WNYC radio host Brian Lehrer. “It is a fact that a lot of people are going to die who don’t need to die if this doesn’t happen quickly.”

As of Friday, 35 people with coronavirus had died in New York State — the second highest number in the nation behind Washington State, where the virus appeared to hit first.

In addition to converting the Javits Center, officials have considered turning a variety of other places into temporary medical facilities, including Madison Square Garden and the student dorms at New York University. A military hospital ship with 1,000 beds is coming, but it will not arrive until April. The state is planning to waive regulations in order to urge hospitals to increase capacity.


Image -- NewYork Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center has set up a “surge tent” for patients with mild respiratory illnesses. Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times

In the short term, hospital workers say their biggest worry is a severe shortage of the medical gear that protects them from sick patients.

The state has three stockpiles of medical supplies, including millions of masks and gloves, as well as more sophisticated equipment like ventilators. On Friday, the state health commissioner, Dr. Howard Zucker, said those supplies had been tapped to help backfill shortages at some hospitals.

Hospitals have been trying to find more of the N95 masks that are most effective at preventing virus spread, as well as lighter surgical masks, goggles and gowns. But with suppliers running out across the world, hospital workers have improvised.

At Kings County Hospital Center and the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, administrators have given doctors one N95 mask to last all week, according to employees at the facilities. At Kings County, emergency room doctors wipe down the masks with hand sanitizer between shifts and put the masks in brown paper bags labeled with their names, a doctor there said.

The Health and Hospitals Corporation, which runs Kings County, denied that workers were being told to reuse masks. A representative of Northwell Health, which includes Long Island Jewish, acknowledged that administrators were trying to preserve masks because the supply was limited.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said that N95 masks should be discarded after each interaction with an infected patient and should not be used for more than eight hours.

At other hospitals across the city and beyond, workers have turned to social media to plead for masks.

In a hospital affiliated with Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, administrators stowed their masks in a locked room after a fistfight broke out among workers and visitors over access to the dwindling stockpile. Several hospitals have sent emails warning workers that they can be fired for the “unauthorized use” of masks.

Medical workers exposed to the coronavirus had been self-quarantining, but this week state and city health officials issued new guidance recommending that hospital workers stay on the job until they show symptoms of the virus. People with symptoms of the virus spread it most easily, but research has also indicated that asymptomatic transmission is possible.

“I’m worried because if we get it, everybody is going to get it,” said Aretha Morgan, a pediatric emergency room nurse at Columbia University Medical Center in Manhattan. “I might actually be exposing children in the E.R.”

Dr. Katz, the head of New York City’s public hospitals, said he understood fears about having to keep working after being exposed. He defended the policy by saying the virus was already widespread, so workers exposed in a hospital setting were not any more exposed than anybody on the subway.

He also said that while more supplies were needed, workers at public hospitals had enough protective gear to last through the end of the month.

The city’s other efforts included reserving 1,500 hotel rooms to potentially use for people with mild coronavirus symptoms or other illnesses, said Deanne Criswell, the city’s commissioner of emergency management.

Some medical students have also volunteered to help respond to the crisis. For now, students are working in support roles, such as taking notes and managing materials, said David Muller, dean for medical education at the Icahn School of Medicine at the Mount Sinai Health System.

But if the number of cases continues to rise, it is possible that graduating students could start seeing patients — though not necessarily ones with the virus — even before their residencies are scheduled to begin in July.

“It could be not even a week or two before we have to sweep away some of those restrictions,” Dr. Muller said.


Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Jesse McKinley and Andrea Salcedo contributed reporting.

Brian M. Rosenthal is an investigative reporter on the Metro Desk. Previously, he covered state government for The Houston Chronicle and for The Seattle Times. @brianmrosenthal

Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York. He has been a reporter at The Times since 2011. @JoeKGoldstein

Michael Rothfeld is an investigative reporter on the Metro desk and co-author of a book, "The Fixers." He was part of a team at The Wall Street Journal that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for stories about hush money deals made on behalf of Donald Trump and a federal investigation of the president's personal lawyer. @mrothfeld

A version of this article appears in print on March 21, 2020, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Short on Beds and Ventilators, New York Hospitals Face Surge . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe



I THINK DR. FAUCI IS DOING JUST FINE. HE CAN’T WAVE A MAGIC WAND (THOSE HAVE BEEN IN VERY SHORT SUPPLY SINCE THE MIDDLE AGES) AND STOP ITS’ PROGRESS. HE IS DOING LOTS OF MEDICALLY RELATED THINGS IN THE BACKGROUND, AND IN THE DAILY NEWS CONFERENCES HE IS CALMLY AND CLEARLY SAYING THINGS THAT ARE MAKING ME FEEL BETTER, AT LEAST FOR THE MOST PART. IT’S A TERRIBLE SITUATION, BUT MORE INFORMATION HAS ALWAYS CALMED ME DOWN, WHILE TOO LITTLE JUST MAKES ME START TO WONDER AND ASK MORE QUESTIONS. WHAT REALLY DOES MAKE ME NERVOUS IS THINGS LIKE THIS STATEMENT FROM THE PRESIDENT – WHICH IS PRESUMABLY TRUE – “THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IS “NOT A SHIPPING CLERK” FOR THE STATES.” THAT MAKES ME FEEL THAT SINKING FEELING IN THE PIT OF MY STOMACH AGAIN.

ABOUT DR. FAUCI AS A “NATIONAL TREASURE,” GO TO THE FOLLOWING URL. IN THAT CASE THE “BUG” INVOLVED WAS ANOTHER HORROR STORY VIRUS IN THE COUNTRY, EBOLA. https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2015/10/national-treasure .

Opinion
Thank God the Doctor Is In
Peeking out our windows, we see America shriveling.
By Maureen Dowd
Opinion Columnist
March 21, 2020, 2:30 p.m. ET

PHOTOGRAPH -- Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t comfortable with everything President Trump spouts at coronavirus briefings.Credit...Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

WASHINGTON — It’s not easy being a national treasure.

“I’m exhausted,” confessed Tony Fauci when I reached him Thursday evening in the middle of another 18-hour workday.

“I have changed my tune a bit, probably thanks to my wife,” said the 79-year-old director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “About a week ago, I was going about four or five days in a row on about three hours of sleep, which is completely crazy, ’cause then I’ll be going on fumes. The last couple of nights, I’ve gotten five hours’ sleep, so I feel much better.”

He said he misses the endorphins of power walking, and he is wracked when he gets home at midnight and it’s too late to answer calls and emails.

“I gotta get rid of this guilt feeling,” he murmured about that moment’s 727 emails.

He said he has not been tested for the coronavirus but takes his temperature every day and usually has it taken another couple times before White House press conferences and meetings in the Oval.

When I spoke with him, he had been missing from the White House briefing for two days and Twitter blew a gasket, with everyone from Susan Rice to Laurence Tribe seeking an answer to the urgent query, “Where is Dr. Fauci?”

Donald Trump, the ultimate “me” guy, is in a “we” crisis and it isn’t pretty. The president is so consumed by his desire to get back his binky, a soaring stock market, that he continues to taffy-twist the facts, leaving us to look elsewhere — to Dr. Fauci and governors like Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom — for leadership during this grim odyssey.

Dr. Fauci chuckled at speculation that he was banished due to his habit of pushing back on Trump’s hyperbolic and self-serving ad-libbing.

“That’s kind of funny but understandable that people said, ‘What the hell’s the matter with Fauci?’ because I had been walking a fine line; I’ve been telling the president things he doesn’t want to hear,” he said. “I have publicly had to say something different with what he states.

“It’s a risky business. But that’s my style, Maureen. You know me for many years. I say it the way it is, and if he’s gonna get pissed off, he’s gonna get pissed off. Thankfully, he is not. Interestingly.”

The first time I talked to Dr. Fauci was during a panic in the mid-80s about stopping another virus, the cause of the heartbreaking AIDs crisis. Then, as now, he was honest, brave and innovative. He told me that he tries to be diplomatic when he has to contradict the president about what “game-changer” cures might be on the horizon and whether everyone who wants to be tested can get tested.

“I don’t want to embarrass him,” the immunologist says, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent. “I don’t want to act like a tough guy, like I stood up to the president. I just want to get the facts out. And instead of saying, ‘You’re wrong,’ all you need to do is continually talk about what the data are and what the evidence is.

“And he gets that. He’s a smart guy. He’s not a dummy. So he doesn’t take it — certainly up to now — he doesn’t take it in a way that I’m confronting him in any way. He takes it in a good way.”

On Friday, a trigger-happy Trump was so quick to talk up the fabulous possibilities of an antimalarial drug in combating the virus that Dr. Fauci had to pump the brakes, taking the microphone to explain that we do not know yet because controlled testing is needed.

The president returned to the lectern to press his unscientific case and compliment himself: “I’m a smart guy,” he said. “I feel good about it. And we’re going to see. You’re going to see soon enough.”

Probably thinking about all his government staffers working round-the-clock, Dr. Fauci could not help rubbing his forehead and cheek — going against his own advice to the public — when Trump cracked a joke about the “Deep State Department.”

Though the scientist listens respectfully when the president and the vice president are talking, he somehow manages to emit an “Oh my God, please don’t say that” vibe when the two men scamper over the line. When Mike Pence went into false-hope overdrive, saying, “I just can’t emphasize enough about the incredible progress that we have made on testing,” Dr. Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, the administration’s virus response coordinator, exchanged a whispered aside that sent the internet into a frenzy.

Dr. Fauci assured me that, despite their crosscurrents and an early overconfidence about how easy it would be to control the path of the virus, the president “absolutely” now gets the threat of “the invisible enemy,” as Trump calls the virus.

Still, Trump managed to have an hourlong press conference about public health guidance in which he relentlessly ran afoul of public health guidance.

He wants to think of himself as a wartime president, but he can’t rise above his pettiness and defensiveness long enough to stop trashing White House reporters who are simply trying to do their job under perilous circumstances. He also can’t move away from his old standby, xenophobia.

Trump has never understood anything about government, so he doesn’t know what the C.D.C. versus the F.D.A. versus FEMA should do. His improvisational leadership style was vividly — and disturbingly — on display Friday during a call with Chuck Schumer, who urged him to invoke the Defense Production Act to get ventilators and masks to desperate states — despite the president’s cavalier remark a day earlier that the federal government is “not a shipping clerk” for the states. “Then POTUS yelled to someone in his office to do it now,” a Schumer spokesman reported.

Trump is just a petrified salesman who believes in perception over reality. He thinks if he can create the perception that this is going to be a quick fix and there’s a little pill coming, then the stock market will roar back, along with his 2020 momentum.

With F.D.R. and the Great Depression, the only thing to fear was fear itself. With Trump and our new abyss, we have to fear not only fear but also the ignorance and misdirection of the White House and the profiteering of senators. Not to mention the virus.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary and author of three New York Times best sellers, became an Op-Ed columnist in 1995. @MaureenDowd • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on March 22, 2020, Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Thank God the Doctor Is In. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

READ 264 COMMENTS


JWL
Vail, co.just now
The extraordinary difference between Donald Trump, and Andrew Cuomo, is stunning. Having disbanded the Pandemic Preparation Team, ignoring warnings since early January from the public health community, Trump is selling snake oil to a terrified public. Governor Cuomo, on the other hand, offered honesty, exhaustion, good information regarding hospital beds, testing, psychiatric help, and just plain good advice to New Yorkers. He leads, he listens, he learns. He should be the coved-19 Czar, we need a better leader than Donald Trump.


John
arytvbew52m ago
Thank God its not Hillary, yes?

And Fauci?  Another in the Mueller/Comey troop of excellent men and Real Patriots who somehow, through reticence, fear, over-abundance of Old School Good Form manage to lend their remarkable histories in service to the Trump machine.  A perfect storm of men who refuse to insist things be done timely and well.

Trump still has not placed his order for ventilators.  All indications are that's going to cost us a lot of grandpas.

You don't have to beat somebody up, but you can't stand passively by and watch opportunities for effective intervention fade in the rear-view.


Lord C.Baker
New York3m ago
This press briefings just show how America lost its way. In no time in modern history has the President of the United States and the republic looked smaller. No global thought leadership, no global coordination just me pity me me stuff. It is clear that the America first mantra has put America last. Everyday we hope that we don’t become China, Italy or Spain and every day we wake up with worst numbers because we were smug about their issues and didnt help them in the first place. Not only didn’t we help but we made the diplomatic channels so poisoned because of trade wars, America first, travel bans that no one shared information with us and the President undermined the domestic intelligence agencies.

Now we are paying a steep price for it. Too steep as we learn every day.


4merNYer
4merNYer
Venice FL7m ago
My biggest fear is that Trump and his minions are dragging their feet on this so that if this situation becomes dangerously unmanageable they can declare Marshall Law and cancel the November election.  That sounds like an apocalypse screenplay, but with Trump and McConnell in charge it could be all too real.


2 REPLIES
Emily commented 5 minutes ago
E
Emily
Fresno5m ago
@4merNYer The president cannot cancel the election, nor can the Senate Majority Leader, nor the governors of states.


Reply2 RecommendShareFlag
M.E.Rogan commented null
M
M.E.Rogan
torontojust now
@Emily I want to be reassured by your comment but I can't. Given how many things Trump has done that we never could have thought possible, there's no reason to think this is his intent now. And, if it benefits the Republican party, he will have the craven windmakers working to make it possible.  Is it really so hard to imagine???


Maggie
Maggie
U.S.A.14m ago
American is not shrinking.

It's bucking up, paying attention -finally - and growing up - somewhat.


Susan
Paris26m ago
Tonight on the French television news, an emminent [sic] French physician and scientist was asked by the news anchor to talk about the potential of the drug hydroxychloroquinein treating the coronavirus. He explained that testing for its effectiveness in reducing the time a person remains contagious with Covid-19, and the possibility that it could make the symptoms less severe were being studied but that the trials were still underway with many uncertainties. When asked by the journalist his reaction to Trump’s “good feeling” about the drug as a miracle cure for the virus, he chuckled gently, shook his head and said that medical researchers here were more interested in clinical evidence.

As this grave global health crisis deepens, our president is a dangerous embarrassment on display for all the world to see.


Reply88 RecommendShareFlag
Richard commented 49 minutes ago
R
Richard
Fullerton, CA26m ago
Yes, any thoughtful person knows the current situation is a disaster.  Let's hope (the only silver lining I can see in this mess) that the crash of 2020 is like the crash of 1929 in one respect: It leads not only to the defeat of Trump, but also to a tectonic shift in politics that leaves the GOP in the wilderness for a very long time.


KC
Washington State26m ago
America is shriveling? At least here in Seattle, I'm mostly seeing an explosion of courage, kindness, creativity, hustle, and rational, science-based state leadership. This crisis is bringing out the best in the kind of people the president hates most, and that can't be all bad. I'm scared, yes, but in some ways I haven't felt this hopeful about America in years.


Michele
Sequim, WA3m ago
@KC Here in Sequim, WA I've seen nothing but kindness and respect. Sure there are outbursts on social media but in real terms the community is responding well.


birddog
oregon34m ago
Great look, Maureen, at what may make Dr Fauci tick. I however am wondering if Fauci has ever read Nevil Schute's great 1957 Cold War novel 'On the Beach'? Schute tell us about a post apocalyptic world following a nuclear war where the only remaining outpost of civilization is in the south most tip of Australia, in Melbourn. And that there, the survivors themselves are awaiting a strange looking cloud of radiation that is creeping ever southward, and is expected to arrive in the next few weeks or months to finish the job.

As head of the CDC, what I think Dr Fauci may find most interesting about Schutes yarn is the reactions of the various individuals in the story to the prospect of their own demise. And how for many of them (even the well educated and otherwise responsible individuals) it involved flat denial, and an irrational unwillingness to accept the inevitable- Even at the   cost of maybe prolonging their own lives, and the lives of their loved ones.

Dr Fauci, if he wasn't aware of it when he first accepted the job in this Administration, is now I think aware that perhaps his greatest challenge would not be in coming up with a rational response to the physical challenges presented by the march of this virus into our midst, but the social and psychological ramifications it presents to us as individuals  and as a society. Self awareness, it seems maybe as much a burden in a situation like this one, then ignorance can be.


KMB
Boston26m ago
@birddog Dr. Fauci doesn't work for this administration and is not a Trump appointee. He has been the director of NIAID since 1984.


Reply26 RecommendShareFlag
Anita commented 58 minutes ago
A
Anita
Mississippi25m ago
@birddog You might want to check Dr. Fauci's background.  He's not the head of CDC, he works for its sister organization NIH.  He has been working as a Federal employee for several decades, he didn't just accept a job in this adminstration. 

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