Can the US health care system “ pull an Italy? ”

by MATTHEW HOLT There has been a ton of analysis about COVID-19 and how bad it will get. Some like Joon Yun and Jeremy Faust say the panic is worse than the disease. Others have run the infection rate numbers and predicted that the US will run out of hospital capacity in early May and in Washington state much earlier (end of March). But there’s no doubt that in the last week or so, sentiment has changed. This week I and 45,000 of my best friends are at home, not at HIMSS in Florida. Many big gatherings like SXSW, Comic-Con and Coachella have been cancelled. Most corporations that can are asking employees to work from home. Just this morning my local school district in California called off school plays and any gatherings with more than 100 people. Part of this is the inevitable response to the ridiculous posing of Trump. He showed up at the CDC wearing a campaign hat and declared that he was a great doctor to be because his uncle was at MIT. The Director of the CDC and later the Surgeon-General made toadying remarks about how amazing he was. And neither Pence, Azar, Carson or anyone else allegedly in charge can give a straight answer to anything. The nation has realized that there is no help or even basic honesty coming from the Federal government. This is after the CDC screwed up the creation of basic testing kits which put the US in a situation where it just can not know the extent of the outbreak. China denied the outbreak, then had to put Wuhan and much...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: CORVID-19 Health Policy Italy Source Type: blogs