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As one of my characters put it, “Trump was a comorbidity.”
This isn’t even funny anymore
How do you keep track of which vial goes with which patient? she asked. Oh, I just put them on different sides of the sink and then I remember, said the young woman.
FUCK OFFFFF
This doctor didn’t wash his hands or use gloves. As he worked, she saw that he had no clear rules about where he put things: dirty vials and syringes wound up on the same table as the clean ones.
Gtfoh
Casa Dorinda went dark. It had no power. “I get up to the door and they have camp light,” Charity recalled. “They had one backup generator and were using the swimming pool for drinking water.”
STOP
An inability to pay attention to anything except that which you find totally riveting might not sound like the most promising trait in a medical student. But almost by process of elimination, it led Carter to his calling: critical care.
lol we find wildly different things riveting clearly hoo buddy
On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire U.S. public transportation system.
Seems like school bus people should maybe help to create a nationwide public transportation system
Lisa was racing back and forth between her CDC day job and her night job, combing through archives of local newspapers that she paid out of her own pocket to access to find out what, exactly, had happened back in 1918.
Don’t tell me the CDC doesn’t have access to JSTOR
Obama wanted to speak with Carter. What’s the worst case? asked the new president. Nineteen eighteen, said Carter. What happened then? asked Obama. Thirty percent of the population was infected, and two percent died, said Carter. In the current situation, you’d be looking at two million dead.
BARACK. Come on!!
He felt a little bad dumping all of this on Obama, as the president was just then dealing with a global financial crisis, two foreign wars, and a domestic fight to the death over his proposed health care plan.
Truly.
“The United States doesn’t really have a public-health system,” she said. “It has five thousand dots, and each one of those dots serves at the will of an elected official.”
Ha ha ha we suck
Snakes don’t have injectable veins. They do, perhaps surprisingly, have hearts, and that’s where the virus must be injected. Snake hearts don’t stay put, like human hearts, but travel up and down the snake’s body.
PARDON THE FUCK???
It was the same lab from which, back in 2001, anthrax had escaped. It had employed the scientist who, in 2008, had committed suicide after being fingered as the likely sender of the letters containing anthrax that had killed five Americans.
Ok I thought it was some unmarked white van weirdo but I never finished the Netflix doc so that’s on me
“I looked over his shoulder at his computer and his inbox had over thirteen thousand unread emails in it,” recalled Wilson.
DOES THIS MAN NOT HAVE AN EA
She called the Red Cross, only to find that the Red Cross has no interest in helping, either. (She learned later that they didn’t want to offend their Republican donors.)
D:
The first thing Karen Smith had asked Charity to do was to resolve a crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. The first thing Sonia Angell asked her to do was to figure out how to set the time on the clock on her desk phone.
Goddamnit Sonia thank goodness Latinos aren’t a monolith
“We know what the virus will do,” she liked to say. “We don’t know what the humans will do.” What the humans would do, she felt certain, is what they were led to do, if only they were well led. As she explained the critical role of the local public-health office, and the need for the state and the federal government to stand behind health officers in their dealings with their communities,
EL OH EL LARRY
There was no system of public health in the United States, just a patchwork of state and local health officers, beholden to a greater or lesser degree to local elected officials. Three thousand five hundred separate entities that had been starved of resources for the past forty years.
Ha ha ha we suuuuuuuck.
Another began to refer to her as “Wolverette.”
That’s not even a THING
Gavin Newsom had no plan to create a lot of testing in California: Why would he? Like everyone else, the governor had assumed the federal government would make sure that the country had enough testing to track any new virus.
Dude should have known better the second Trump was elected
In a single room the size of a basketball court, a COVID testing lab took shape. Setting it up gave Joe his first real view of the medical-industrial complex. It wasn’t designed for a crisis; if it was designed for anything, it was to maximize the profits of companies that enjoyed monopoly power. Labcorp and Quest, which were charging the state one hundred sixty dollars for every COVID test and returning the results so slowly that they were useless, were just one example.
Makes me want to boycott Quest and Labcorp but lols to that
they required expensive chemicals made only by their manufacturers, and so shared the same infuriating quality as razors and office printers.
Wait what is this about razors
Over and over again he saw the wild inefficiency of the private sector as a creator of knowledge. Far more often than not, some promising avenue of research would die as a failed company. He hated that; he hated the way financial ambition interfered with science and progress.
This can’t be news to him though
“It shows up as an error in the hospital computer if we put zero cost,” said Zuckerberg. “It won’t accept zero.” “Can’t you put like one-tenth of a cent?” asked Joe. They couldn’t. The system wouldn’t allow it.
CLOWN SHIT
Lucas Simpson called to say that the truck had been located in West Sacramento, but without swabs. What he didn’t say, because he was too embarrassed to say it, was that inside the truck they’d discovered not medical swabs but Q-tips. So far as he could tell, there had never been any swabs in the Strategic National Stockpile.
Sounds about right
the Trump administration would claim with fanfare that supplies were on their way to the states and leave it to the career civil servants whose job was to interact with state officials to reap the humiliation when those supplies failed to arrive.
…yeah that sounds about right.
Among other consequences of the White House’s strategy was that it gutted the credibility of the career federal officials.
Ha ha ha just wait till he gets reelected!
they kind of looked like swabs.” But they weren’t sterile, or even packaged, so right there he knew they weren’t medical supplies of any kind. Joe studied them until the penny dropped: eyelash brushes. Some crafty soul had bought eyelash brushes, relabeled them as medical swabs, and sold them to the VC at a profit.
Pls tell me this guy was arrested?
The owner of a Bay Area chemical company, Chris Kawaja, found another off-brand Chinese nasal swab supplier and messaged them. “I said, ‘Hey, do you have these things?’ ” Kawaja recalled, “and this woman came right back and said, ‘Yeah I have two hundred fifty thousand.’ ” These swabs were the real deal, but before Kawaja could nab them, the woman at the Chinese supplier sent another message to say, “Some guy in Houston just took two hundred thousand of them.” Kawaja charged the rest to his credit card—at 70 cents a pop, triple the old market price—and had them shipped to the Chan Zuckerberg
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GOOD QUESTION MY GUY
Many local health offices were so understaffed and underequipped that they had trouble using the test kits. Most were unable to receive the results electronically; they needed the results faxed to them. Some had fax machines so old that they couldn’t receive more than six pages at a time. A few didn’t even have functioning fax machines, and so the Biohub got into the business of buying and delivering fax machines along with test kits.
IN THE YEAR TWO THOUSAND AND TWENTY
He had memories of Poland as a communist regime, and of the total breakdown of the government’s ability to be useful to its citizens. What he saw in the local U.S. public-health offices reminded him of public services in Poland, but before the collapse of communism. “Poland now is not like this,” said David, after seeing the inside of a U.S. public-health office. “Poland now is more functional. Eastern Europeans are tough and kind of not shocked by a failed state. But these are the symptoms of a failed state.”
This was written in 2021. O__o
The expression “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” actually isn’t usually true for human beings. It is for bacteria, however.
Well that’s just fucking great NOW you tell me.
The final horror of the situation revealed itself when the hospital called the parents to inform them that their baby was brain-dead. “We don’t have a son,” they said. The Oaxacan community, at least that part of it encountered by the public-health nurses in Santa Barbara County, rejected children with serious defects. They pretended that the child had never been born. Charity was informed that the little boy would live out his days in a medical orphanage.
Jfc the concept of a medical orphanage sounds like an actual horror movie invention
Agustin had broken out of quarantine.
Agustin coñaso get back in there
One measure of poverty is how little you have. Another is how difficult you find it to take advantage of what others try to give you.
D:
