What 300 doctors said this week
I’m tired of hearing what politicians, media blowhards, and self-appointed experts think about COVID-19. I want to hear what doctors have to say. This week, they spoke.
About 300 Arkansas doctors in a variety of specialties sent an open letter to Gov. Asa Hutchinson dated Nov. 15. They were listed along with their field of medicine and a time-stamp. Here’s part of what they wrote.
“We are seeing ICUs full of COVID-19 patients. Our hospitals are filling up to the brim, and the virus is continuing to spread unchecked in our communities, meaning that the worst is approaching. Soon we will shoot past our capacity to care for patients. We will need field hospitals, the children’s hospitals will need to take adult patients, and our ability to care for patients with routine emergencies such as trauma patients, heart attacks, and strokes will be greatly compromised. Healthcare providers will become overwhelmed and burn out, as many have already. We will see COVID-19 take the lives of many Arkansans, both directly and indirectly.”
The letter came during what had been a grim week. On Wednesday, the number of Arkansans currently hospitalized because of COVID-19 passed 900. As pointed out by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, it had been
700 only two weeks earlier. Thirty additional deaths were attributed to COVID-19 that day. On Monday, the announced death toll rose by 42. A White House Coronavirus Task Force released a report Tuesday saying Arkansas is “on the precipice” of seeing rapidly increasing cases that will lead to new hospital admissions.
There’s also been some very good news about vaccines. Pfizer says its vaccine appears to be 95% effective, while Moderna has one that is 94.5% effective. They could be produced fairly soon, with front-line medical personnel – the ones exposing themselves daily to the disease – among the first to receive it. The rest of us will have to wait in line after them, as we should.
In other words, it will be months before most people can be vaccinated, so the governor and other leaders must figure out what to do until then.
Here’s what the doctors prescribed. They asked the governor – “implore” is the word they used – to take three steps. First, enforce a universal mask mandate. Second, close all bars and gyms and limit restaurants to takeout service only. Third, restrict all indoor gatherings to less than 10 people. They also asked the governor to follow the Department of Health’s directives.
The governor does not have to follow the doctors’ advice, just like their patients often don’t. On Thursday, he announced that businesses that sell alcohol on premises must close by 11 p.m. He called it a “balanced approach.”
What about the future? Governors live in the world of what can be done, regardless of what should be done. The governor can issue mandates, even unenforceable ones, and they can have an effect just from the force of leadership and social pressure. But he also can’t push too hard and must balance public health with other needs, including working people’s need to make a living and students’ need to get an education.
With or without mandates, the response to the pandemic ultimately depends on average people, and here’s where the state’s doctors and nurses can do a great service on top of the heroic service they are already performing. We need
to keep hearing from them about this issue. As helpful as the governor’s press conferences have been, we need doctors and nurses to describe what they are seeing in public service announcements and other appearances. They are living in an entirely different world than many of us. We need more insight into that world.
The balance between public health, the economy, individual freedoms and personal responsibility is impossible to achieve perfectly, and we’ll never completely agree about it.
What’s been so confounding about this pandemic is that we’re still arguing over whether the patient is even sick. So, again, here’s what the doctors wrote: “Our hospitals are filling up to the brim, and the virus is continuing to spread unchecked in our communities, meaning that the worst is approaching. Soon we will shoot past our capacity to care for patients. … We will see COVID-19 take the lives of many Arkansans, both directly and indirectly.”
Let’s at least listen to their diagnosis, and then decide about their prescription.