The Real Problem: The Cracks In Our System

From Jacob Riis’s “How The Other Half Lives”

This is a miserable and tragic read:

Coronavirus pandemic: We were caught unprepared. It is too late for shutdowns to save us - USA TODAY

I wrote about this a week ago here as well, but what I didn’t comment on and what is the real crux is what I see as follows:

Is The Cure Worse Than The Disease?

1. This pandemic has exposed the giant cracks in our system and societies. People should not have to make a choice between health and jobs. It exposes how inept and weak our social contract is for our society and it is unacceptable.
2. We should not have a health system that is on the brink nor one in which we do not have the supplies nor the capability to quickly supply our front-line workers.

As the article points out, we shouldn’t have to make terrible trade-off’s, but that is a reality. It is a reality that our doctor’s and nurses are already facing in determining who they should focus on saving…they are having to make life & death trade-off’s just as with doctors and nurses on the front-lines in every war. Once again, we’re asking the few to sacrifice for the many because of poor preparedness, poor leadership, and misguided priorities.

That being said, we have an opportunity (a necessity) to learn from this and change quickly! We can muster all to act and provide in a national challenge to solve our big problems just as we did when FDR created the CCC (more on this later). The net: we need to be investing in areas we’ve neglected; we need to be manufacturing things that matter; we need to have leaders that lead and social contracts that “defend and protect” and bind us.

Never in history have we had so much; have we been capable of so much; have we been so connected. Out of this tragedy, we have an opportunity to fix the things that matter…together! We have to…for our kids; for the next generation…I know my parents (both medical professionals) would agree to focus on that.

In the meantime, yes, we need to slow the curve; we need to have tests widely deployed; we need PPE and ventilators at scale; we need surveillance systems with ground-truth data to precisely deploy resources…but this isn’t going away until we have treatments or a vaccine.