"On Friday, for the first time in any state in American history, Arizona activated crisis standards for hospitals, giving them flexibility to triage the huge number of new COVID-19 patients and ration care. This was once the nightmare scenario." (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"In the spring, it was said we had to do everything we possibly could to avoid this situation — to flatten the curve, even if we couldn’t suppress the disease, so at the very least our hospitals were able to treat all those who needed care."
"It’s not just in Arizona, where, over the last week, there have been more new cases per capita than anywhere else in the world — making it the epicenter of a global pandemic whose primary incubator, for several months now, has been the United States."
"In Texas, an ICU doctor at San Antonio Methodist told CNN, in what became a heartbreakingly viral interview, that he had received calls for ten patients to be transferred to his unit, but only had space for three."
"Over the last month, the San Antonio hospital system as a whole has seen roughly a tenfold increase in patients. In the Rio Grande Valley, ten of 12 hospitals are already full."
"Officials in Austin and Houston believe in each city that hospital capacity could be overwhelmed in 10 days. The state is divided into trauma service regions; the East Texas Gulf Coast region, home to more than a million, has six ICU beds available and 364 coronavirus patients."
"In Florida, 54 hospitals in 25 counties report they are already at capacity, with no ICU beds available at all; in 30 other hospitals, intensive care units were already 90 percent full or more. (This after refusing to make public hospital data for several weeks.)"
"The rest of the country could have learned some lessons from New York, as New York could have learned its own lessons from earlier outbreaks elsewhere in the world — from the horrors of Lombardy but also the models of Taiwan and Japan, among others, not to mention Wuhan itself."
"But while many parts of the country did rush into lockdown, almost none took the the opportunity, and time, offered by those lockdowns to actually build out any kind of institutional prophylaxis against the disease."
"That would have meant scaling up mass-testing, hiring into contact tracing programs, and descending on nursing homes with public-health personnel and PPE—enforcing around those most vulnerable communities something like a legitimate, protective quarantine."
"Hardly any leaders even floated mask-wearing advisories until they were themselves neck-deep in a local pandemic crisis."
"They could not learn from others, only taking actions like these in a sort of last-gasp panic state. Everyone had to suffer themselves, and learn for themselves, through that suffering and death." America the ineducable. (x/x)
