Dr. Emily Landon – chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine.
This virus is unforgiving. It spreads before you even know you’ve caught it and it tricks you into believing that it’s nothing more than a little influenza.
For many of us, it may be just a little flu so it can be very confusing when schools are closed, restaurants are shuttered and now this virus is taking what’s left of our precious liberty.
The real problem is not the 80 percent who will get over this in a week. It’s the 20 percent of patients, the older, those who are immunocompromised, those that have other medical problems who are going to need a bit more support- some oxygen or even a ventilator and life support.
✄
Our healthcare system doesn’t have any slack. There are no empty wards waiting for patients or nurses waiting in the wings. We barely even have enough masks for the nurses that we have.
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All we have to slow the spread is distance. Social distance. If we let every patient with this infection infect three more people and then each of them infect two or three people, there won’t be a hospital bed when my mother can’t breathe very well or when yours is coughing too much.
✄
We need to fight this fire before it grows too high. But these extreme restrictions may seem in the end a little anticlimactic because it’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world when you’re watching Netflix on your couch but, if we do this right, nothing happens.
Yes. A successful shelter in place means that you will feel like it was all for nothing.
And you would be right. Because “nothing” means that nothing happened to your family and that’s what we are going for here.
(Repost)
Dr. Emily Landon – chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine.
This virus is unforgiving. It spreads before you even know you’ve caught it and it tricks you into believing that it’s nothing more than a little influenza.
For many of us, it may be just a little flu so it can be very confusing when schools are closed, restaurants are shuttered and now this virus is taking what’s left of our precious liberty.
The real problem is not the 80 percent who will get over this in a week. It’s the 20 percent of patients, the older, those who are immunocompromised, those that have other medical problems who are going to need a bit more support- some oxygen or even a ventilator and life support.
✄
Our healthcare system doesn’t have any slack. There are no empty wards waiting for patients or nurses waiting in the wings. We barely even have enough masks for the nurses that we have.
✄
All we have to slow the spread is distance. Social distance. If we let every patient with this infection infect three more people and then each of them infect two or three people, there won’t be a hospital bed when my mother can’t breathe very well or when yours is coughing too much.
✄
We need to fight this fire before it grows too high. But these extreme restrictions may seem in the end a little anticlimactic because it’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world when you’re watching Netflix on your couch but, if we do this right, nothing happens.
Yes. A successful shelter in place means that you will feel like it was all for nothing.
And you would be right. Because “nothing” means that nothing happened to your family and that’s what we are going for here.
~
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-doctors-blunt-speech-about-covid-19-hit-home-across-the-country-read-her-full-speech/2241815/