I sort of think that people still have a fundamentally cinematic view of pandemics--it is either the Walking Dead, or everything is basically fine. And on the health care side, they imagine labor shortages can be solved with a fundamentally 19th c surge of unskilled "nurses".
Giving a severely ill covid patient anything other than palliative care is a skilled endeavor--there's a lot of technology, including stuff you really, really need to get right like medication dosage and ventilator settings. This isn't Scarlett O'Hara mopping brows.
You don't acquire that kind of knowledge in a four-hour orientation, even if overworked and exhausted staff had time to give it. So to a first approximation, we're going into the second wave with the same amount of staff we had in the first.
On the disease side--hey, I'm glad it's not the Walking Dead, but the death rates get pretty gnarly when hospitals hit their staff-dependent capacity limits, and start diving into younger age groups. That's decades of life lost, which is bad!
One other way that we are still suffering under cinematic illusions, at least on the left, is the idea of technocratic omnicompetence at institutions like the CDC, which performed astoundingly badly in the early days of this crisis, and not Because Trump.
Also, from the movies you'd have expected that the main problem would be people trying to flee the danger and being quarantined for the sake of others -- not people insisting on their right to book a restaurant reservation for 8 in the middle of the hot zone.
Anyway, I think we'd have a more productive conversation about this stuff if we all ditched our movie-driven expectations.
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