Keep Petri Dishes in the Lab

By KIM BELLARD COVID-19 is changing the landscape of our healthcare system, and, indeed, of our entire society, in ways that we hadn’t been prepared for and with implications that we won’t fully grasp for some time.  As we grapple with how to reshape our healthcare system and our society in the wake of the pandemic, though, I worry we’re going to focus on the wrong problems.   Take, for example, nursing homes, prisons, and the meatpacking industry.   Anyone who has been paying attention to the pandemic will recognize that each of these have been “hot spots,” and have been called “petri dishes” for coronavirus (as are cruise ships, but that’s a different article).  These institutions aren’t the only places where masses of people congregate, but they seem to do so in ways that create fertile territories for COVID-19.  And that’s the problem. We knew early on that nursing homes were going to be a problem.  We knew COVID-19 was a problem in Wuhan, but that was far away — until a few cases emerged in late February in a skilled nursing home in King County, Washington.   We know now that these were not the first cases, nor the first deaths, but we were stunned by how quickly it spread in that facility.  By mid-March experts were already calling nursing homes “ground zero,” and that has been proven right.&n...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: COVID-19 Health Policy Kim Bellard Source Type: blogs