The COVID Pandemic: WHO Dunnit?

By ANISH KOKA, MD

COVID is here. A little strand of RNA that
used to live in bats has a new host.  And
that strand is clearly not the flu.  New
York is overrun, with more than half of the nation’s new cases per day, and
refrigerated 18-wheelers parked outside hospitals serve as makeshift
morgues.  Detroit, New Orleans, Miami,
and Philadelphia await an inevitable surge of their own with bated breath.  America’s health care workers are scrambling
to hold the line against a deluge of sick patients arriving hourly at a rate
that’s hard to fathom. 

I pause here to attest to the heroic response
of the medical community and the countless more working to support them. At the
time of this writing, despite 368,000 confirmed cases in the United States,
11,000 deaths have been reported.  A
horrid number, but still a far cry from Italy with 130,000 cases, and 16,523
deaths, and Spain with 14,000 deaths amidst 140,000 cases.  Italy and Spain may be a few weeks ahead of
the United States, but at the moment, Italy and Spain have case fatality rates
(12.5%, 10%) that are multiples of the United States (2.5%). If this rate does
stand, it will be a testament to the tenacity of medical workers toiling under
extenuating circumstances.

With the scale of the tragedy now obvious, the
take from some very smart people is that the people who should have been paying
attention were asleep at the wheel.  The
easy target is the bombastic New York ...

Source: The Health Care Blog - April 11, 2020 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Zoya Khan Tags: COVID-19 Health Policy Anish Koka coronavirus Pandemic Sars-CoV-2 WHO World Health Organization Source Type: blogs