By Dr. Stuart Weiss, Intelligent Crowd Solutions

Dr. Stuart Weiss, FACEP, FAAP, CBCP

July 2, 2020
Today's topics: We are an unbelievable horror to the rest of the world

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Articles in newspapers around the world are expressing the mixture of horror and astonishment at the absolute failure of the US to contain the CoViD-19 pandemic. One article asked the question best: Oh My God, how did America, the shining beacon of democracy, the country we looked up to and wanted to be like, the leader of the free world, fail so miserably at taking care of itself?

If you look around the world you can see examples of countries everywhere emerging from the Pandemic and resuming life. The European Union is reopening to travelers, New Zealand is back to playing rugby. Malls are reopened in Japan. My favorite was a report on the news of a massive community dinner on the Charles River bridge in the Czech Republic celebrating the end of CoViD-19 without social distancing or face coverings. Our neighbor to the north, Canada is now keeping the border closed because they don't want us going there. A survey in Alberta showed that only 6% of Canadians want Americans to come there. It was a bit better in Quebec at 24%. Most Canadian don't want us.

I can't blame them. Who would want us to come. We hit another daily record of new cases, the sixth new record in the past nine days. Over 50,000 new cases. The percentage of positive tests is increasing so this is clearly not due to more testing capability. To put this into perspective, as the writer Matt O'Brien wrote, Florida reported 10,109 new cases yesterday. If you take the combined population of 2.6 billion people in the countries of China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Republic of Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden, they only had an average of 6760 new cases per day. The state of Florida by itself had 1 1/2 times more new cases than all those other countries combined.

We are struggling in a way that no other country has struggled. We are not acting like the United States of America but instead, we are acting like 50 individual countries. When I flew home this morning from Nashville, I received a notice that listed southern and south western states and advised me that I must now self isolate for 14 days because I came from one of them. North eastern states don't want people from other areas to bring the virus in.

In a way, most of the other countries have it much easier than we do. They have government health care programs with centralized data collection and centralized control. When the leader wants to do something, they speak to their health minister and implement changes. They have centralized purchasing, centralized protocol, uniform procedures. In the US, we have 50 states competing for resources, implementing policies based on political considerations, no one setting a clear policy for all of us. It can't possibly work this way. We are too mobile a society to get the virus under control with different Governors doing different things. This lack of leadership from the President is no longer just an inconvenience, its killing us. Dr. Fauci said yesterday that we are on track to reach 100,000 new cases per day. The current models of death rates show us spiking up sharply towards the end of the summer if we don't change direction.

It's no wonder why the E.U. has banned Americans from entering. They can see what's happening. They can see it but our own leadership does not. Trump said today that states will decide how quickly to reopen their economies but that "we'd like to see churches open quickly."

At the same time, Vice President Mike Pence said that the White House would "keep opening up America" despite the surge in COVID-19 cases, according to CNBC.

In the early days of the pandemic, we stumbled. But now its July and we still have people waiting in lines that are 5 hours long to get tested. We still have areas that are not mandating face coverings. We still have shortages of N-95 masks and other PPE. After 5 months, we still don't have enough PPE to protect ourselves. How is this possible?

Its possible because we didn't fix the problems we discovered in March and April. We didn't shore up supply chains, we didn't develop national protocols. So we go into Independence Day weekend with hospitals cancelling elective surgeries and straining with full ICU's. According to the AP, the infection curve is rising in 40 of 50 states and 36 states are seeing an increase in the percentage of positive coronavirus tests. We must find a different path for ourselves. We have no choice and time is running out to make a course correction.

Masks work but even smart people don't understand them

I was in the local food market this evening purchasing some needed items. This particular store has two floors with the organic products upstairs. I went to take my cart into the elevator and another men in his late 30's tried to enter. I politely asked him to take the next elevator since the elevator was too small for social distancing. I was upstairs near the elevator doors looking at some plant based cheese (don't roll your eyes, they have the best non-dairy cheese I have ever had, I can't eat dairy products) when the elevator returned and the young man stormed out and came right over to me. With a lopsided surgical mask hanging across his face, he screamed at me that he was an ICU doc who has been on CNN and in the New York Times and that small spaces were okay with face coverings like his. I tried to explain about gaps in face coverings and especially his face covering. He just didn't get it. I assume he was a good ICU doc but he sure didn't understand face coverings or respiratory droplets. I tried to engage but he dropped an "F" bomb in my direction and stormed off. An ICU doc with anger issues is not a pretty site.

Remember, face coverings work and they work well. They protect others from your droplets. Face coverings do not protect you very much. So everyone in a space must wear a face covering. If one person doesn't, they put everyone else at risk. This whole argument that wearing a face covering is a personal decision is false. The decision to wear a face covering has nothing to do with whether you want to protect yourself or not. You are protecting others from your droplets.

So this weekend, wear a face covering and maintain social distancing. Don't go to Mount Rushmore where the Trump campaign says there "will be no social distancing". It is possible to enjoy the holiday and protect your loved ones.

Be well and take care of yourself. There are storm clouds on the horizon.

--Dr. Stu

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