Prioritize the elderly
Don’t demand medical help you don’t need
As testing slowly ramps up and officially reported cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States start rising in state after state, it’s increasingly clear that the virus is in the wild.
It’s an infection with common symptoms from which most people recover. With a long incubation period, easy spread and limited testing to date, it is almost certain that thousands more people than officially recorded have it, will soon have it or even have already had it, and no one will be the wiser.
The virus is not life-threatening for least 97% of people who get it, and, if there are many more cases out there than are currently showing up in official numbers, a much higher percentage than that. And it’s not just a random 97% to 99%plus. We know who those 97% to 99%-plus are.
That doesn’t mean none of us should worry or none of us should change our habits. All of us should take the precautions we ought to take in any case to prevent the spread of very communicable diseases.
That’s the responsible way to live in a society. Wash hands. Stay home when sick. Cover your mouth when sneezing. Don’t do stupid stuff that is likely to accelerate the spread of a pathogen. If you don’t do these things already, coronavirus should be a generalized wake-up call, particularly if you regularly come into contact with vulnerable people.
Beyond that, is there anything else that we should all be doing? Should an otherwise healthy 42year-old woman who starts showing flu or coronavirus symptoms, which are to her likely indistinguishable from one another, rush to the emergency room, when there isn’t really any other treatment available once they get there? No.
This coronavirus, like other respiratory infections, hits certain groups of people especially hard: the elderly, the immunocompromised. Almost any definitive statistic is a guessing game at this stage given how spotty testing has been, but it’s at the very least 15 times deadlier for these groups.
We don’t want them to get sick in the first place if we can help it — which is why anyone who visits a nursing home or the house of a cancer patient (or lives in one) should be exceedingly careful. Definitely cancel the trip to grandma and grandpa’s house if you’re feverish and congested and sneezing. Wash your hands and all that.
(By the way: I’m not a doctor, but I have discussed and verified this guidance with people who are.)
And if elderly and immunocompromised people do get sick, we want them to get medical attention.
That is why we should not have otherwise healthy people who are going to successfully battle this, just as they would a flu, flood our common health care resources. It’s unwise to overwhelm emergency rooms with them when the people who really need to be seen and supported with respirators and whatever other assistance is available at this stage need and deserve first priority. Never mind all the other people showing up in ERs with totally unrelated problems who need attention.
It’s counterproductive and perhaps even unethical if you don’t really need medical help but demand it, like getting in line ahead of people you know to be starving for a limited supply of free food.
There’s another reason otherwise healthy infected people probably shouldn’t be showing up at hospitals. That will make it that much likelier that health care professionals get infected, putting them out of commission for days or weeks and compounding all the other problems we are going to face managing an outbreak.
Widespread, indiscriminate concern is understandable in the early stages of an outbreak, when it looks like the spread might be containable. But after that stage passes, it is really, really important not to treat every case equally. Some people need to be very worried; other people do not.
The virus is now running amok. So is worry. Neither can be put back in the bottle. Our leaders need to try hard to start communicating some clear and sane distinctions between who needs to seek out medical attention and who doesn’t, or we might make a serious problem worse.