Monday, February 21, 2022
No response to a vital issue with overreaching international implications has elicited such passionate opinions as the COVID19 pandemic had, going back over 5 decades that I have been in the US, immersed and working most of which was as a healthcare provider, until my retirement in 2010. It’s understandable that as seniors, which are the most vulnerable segment of the population, our antennas are up to the latest of the government’s efforts to curve the pandemic. Joe Biden, who owes much of his election to the presidency from the perceived inadequacy of President Trump’s response to the Pandemic, seemed to have embraced it as paramount to his administration, and yet, had yielded the floor to Dr. Anthony Fauci, who in turn had assumed the Napoleon Complex with his dictatorial misconception, that any opinion contrary to his is against science, a perversion of what medical science is all about. Cutting off the debate is ludicrous, and contrary to the history of American medicine, which had developed different spheres of influence from all corners of the country, due to the 50 independent and disparate State Health Departments in the US, and ultimately, yielding to the primacy of the patient in determining what kind of treatment he chooses with an input in the management of the spread of the disease. It is not just a one size fits all situation, it’s a big country with variate demography, population densities and climates. Would lockdowns make sense in Wyoming with 135 cases yesterday in a land over 60% of California which had 14,213? Time and again, the US Supreme Court had struck down Federal Mandates, and after all things are considered, the primacy of the patient’s choice in the management of his disease.
While managing a Pandemic may seem to be in the purview of the Medical Community, there are ramifications of the management which had to be considered like quarantines and lockdowns, which if implemented in an ironclad manner, could devastate the supply chains for food, energy, transportation, healthcare and other elements of a functioning economy, which could adversely affect the survival of the population itself, need we be reminded that combatants in battles, use sieges which are like quarantines and lockdowns, to defeat their enemy, sometimes inflicting more deaths than from actual combats.
Shouldn’t we mourn the 2 year loss of interactive contact in the education and the formative years of our most precious commodity, our children, most of which are unrecoverable? Victims of a cabal of public teachers and their unions, who we have entrusted as guardians of their welfare, and yet had behaved in a selfish manner, emboldened by the availability of the Internet, using the pandemic as a tool to extract favors. Ironically, in over relying in their use, they had unwittingly exposed the flaw in their perceived indispensability, for the Private and Catholic Schools returned to class way ahead of them. Are they more motivated and more indispensable than them?
How ironic that people who we once called as heroes during the times of distress, many paying with their lives are now being called by our leaders as unpatriotic hoodlums, even murderers, because they have refused the vaccination mandates. Don’t they deserve a better treatment than that?
We grieve at the thought of nearly a million dead so far presumed to be from COVID 19, yet in spite of the toll from the Pandemic, the overall number of deaths of Americans over 65 with or without COVID 19 in 2020 was; Number of deaths of persons age 65 and over was 2,509,396. Let’s compare that to the year before, without COVID19; In 2019, a total of 2,854,838 resident deaths were registered in the United States. It’s over 300,000 less death! Was that a mirage? No, I don’t think so, we were just made more aware of our loved ones, friends and acquaintances that we had lost.
In conclusion let’s strive to obtain vaccination, masks, and social distancing as much as possible, without federal mandates, concentrate on the protection and treatment of the most vulnerable segment of the population, selective quarantines and lockdowns with limited duration. This should be weighed against the public necessity of a viable economy, we could not be held hostage to the Virus, for as the H1N1 Flu Pandemic had shown, we still have it 12 years after it visited us and is not showing a desire to leave. It’s not a novelty, we as doctors had known it for generations, sadly, it took a pandemic and a toll of a million lives to relearn it.
Honorio M. Cruz, MD, FACS