Looking Forward to Better Days

[DonH]

Fascinating to watch how all of this has transpired. Remember when New York, Jersey and a few others were just getting cratered? At the same time my state and much of the west coast had very little. Now NY has been doing much better but California is getting blasted. Yet is there a state that has more lock downs, regulations and requirements than California, yet with all of these the numbers are still way up and hospital beds are still running short. Meantime my state has few regulations, peaked a few weeks before thanksgiving and finally had a handful of patients use the 9 million dollar over flow temporary facility as hospihlizations topped 2,200 which was about 85% capacity for us. All sorts of warnings came that it would get worse after thanksgiving and we’d likely run out of beds. Instead the opposite has happened and we continue to be on the downward end. By Christmas we were down to 1,350 hospitalized. Today we are just over 1,000 or well under half of only 2 months ago and clearly the opposite of any holidays spike - TG or it would appear Christmas though a bit premature to tell for certain for Christmas. The 9 million dollar facility is again vacant having treated 168 total patients before going dormant again. Was checking EarthCam over NYE and was surprised to see Dublin Ireland shut down again. Sure enough they are having a third huge spike with higher numbers than ever before! So clearly it’s not just the USA. Hmmmmmmmm.

Clearly the ability to accurately predict and certainly effect the numbers has proven to be very limited. Places with huge restrictions are doing no better than some of those without them. Places that started off really bad are doing better, until they are not. One county in my state had zero cases through nearly summer. Not a single case for months! Now they are at the top of the list for new cases. It’s their turn. It would be nice if we could take meaningful measures that proved to make a significant difference. So far I’m not seeing them. To me it sounds like most of the rest of medicine. Other than infections, we don’t cure much, we just manage it. Cancer and heart disease are still huge killers despite great efforts. We’ve done pretty well with HIV and AIDS. Hopefully it will be the same with covid. But I think back to the predictions and reactions to HIV and see not much has changed. We still have a lot to learn about the practice of medicine. Hopefully covid will run its course in CA and get better like NYC. Lots and lots of people in one area though. So far I hear for my state that 1 in 12 people have been infected since this all started. At least 92% have not. The record breaking time that operation warp speed started getting effective vaccines into peoples arms will probably save more lives than everything else that was tried - combined. I’m thinking thats our best chance out of this, which if we even keep to 1 in 10 being infected before vaccines are wide spread, that would be pretty good. Sadly I’m not sure we’ve learned anything. Everyone still thinks their way is the right way, politicians think they know more than physicians, and stopping the spread of a virus has proved to be a huge task. Hopefully I’ll be in the 9 out of 10 group. On my third bottle of hand sanitizer trying.