Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/26/thank-you-all-in-emergency-f.html
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I have several family members who work in the medical profession including both my sisters. I expect their lives will become a living hell very shortly and I worry for their health and the health of their families.
If you put any them in danger because you selfishly choose to take actions that expose yourself or others to the virus unnecessarily, I may have to hunt you down and punch you in the face.
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With a 6-foot pole.
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And protective gloves, obviously.
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I’ve been a volunteer emergency medic for more than 20 years. It’s addictive. Seriously.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich tells us that if we give people unemployment compensation sufficient to prevent immediate starvation, nurses will quit working to get it.
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God just told me Newt is a douche bag.
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I think about this a lot, in the context of all the right-wingers who are still denying the seriousness of the situation, deliberately shaking hands to “own the libs,” going to “coronavirus parties” to get infected (ha, ha!), etc. There has to be some punishment for those kinds of people. Besides getting sick from the virus, that is, because in getting sick, they’ll be not just be threatening the health of health-care workers, but other patients. I think New York has already hit the same stage as Italy, where older patients are getting booted off ventilators (and left to die) to make room for younger patients who need them and potentially have a better prognosis. I keep thinking about reckless young people, who might have even deliberately infected themselves, surviving at the expense of someone who was careful but got it anyways, just because of age.
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“coronavirus parties”…!!! What…The…F*c., Is this actually a thing???
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Unfortunately, yes. I keep reading about them in various states (in the context of how they’re the epicenter for outbreaks). I don’t know if any have actually been about trying to deliberately infect themselves (though that’s been proposed), or they’re just mocking those who take it seriously…
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So either a javelin, lance or polearm will do?
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But no so hard they take up valuable space in a hospital.
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I’m glad they were able to save his wife, and I hope he manages to avoid it as well.
That said, these are the people the GOP would rather just hurry up and die.
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fwiw, one of the kids at that party in Kentucky later turned up positive for the virus, so those kids are getting their wish. i guess we’ll just find out how immune they are.
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I just want to give that guy a hug that is a beautiful thing
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For all the young ones, be advised that a guy I work with who is a 37 years old, 6’3” super fit marine construction contractor just got out of the hospital. On his way out he finally (7 freaking days later) got his test results today which were positive. The disease completely kicked his ass to the point of being brought to the hospital in an ambulance where he stayed for a week. He was not eating ice cream and watching movies there. He was wrecked. He is lucky to be alive and was just sent home only because he was deemed “out of the woods” enough to make space for someone worse. That new person is lucky to have a bed because Brooklyn hospital down the street from me has a tent in front of it set up by soldiers(?) and it has a line of sick people that stretches down the block. The convention center is being set up as a hospital. This is happening.
As for me, I’ve been sitting in my apartment for 8 days since I sat in a conference room with him and so far so good.
This may have been a little off topic. But your reference to dumb dumbs treating the whole situation as hype is something I know is happening and it makes me lose my shit.
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I feel absolutely useless at the moment. All I can do here in downtown Vancouver is self-isolate and lean out of the window each night at 7pm and cheer the shift change at nearby St. Paul’s Hospital … because anyone on the front-line of this is a hero. I hope society as a whole remembers this once life returns to some semblance of normalcy.
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I believe this came here from Italy or Spain (or both) it was moving to hear the number of people who joined in.
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Yes! I’m surprised this doesn’t appear to have been reported on BB but for anyone who missed it, the whole of the UK opened their doors and applauded the NHS at 8pm last night and it was fucking wonderful.
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Yeah, it makes me crazy how the whole “it’s only dangerous to old people” narrative has seemingly been accepted, despite young people dying and being put on ventilators. A 17 year old died in LA. I keep reading about women in their early 30s who are either being put on ventilators or dying (often because hospitals turn them away for being “low risk”), and men are twice as likely to die from it. It also ignores that surviving could still mean suffering serious illness and organ damage. People focus on the risk factors like pre-existing health conditions and being a smoker, but obviously there’s a genetic lottery at play here, too - if you have the right kind of immune genes, you might suffer no ill effects, but if you don’t, you could die, regardless of how “healthy” you are.
Connected to this, what also drives me crazy is the “for younger people, it’s no worse than the flu” argument, because it’s both misleading and wrong. Misleading because they’re essentially comparing the death rate for the least vulnerable from this to the death rate for everyone, including the most vulnerable, from the flu. Wrong because it’s still arguably like an order of magnitude worse, even in this disingenuous comparison.
