The Only Post I Can Write Right Now

I was thinking about what to write about this week and realized there is only one thing to write about, and that’s what everyone is thinking and talking about.

I live on Long Island, in New York. In my county of some 1.4 million people, there were perhaps a handful of coronavirus cases a little more than a week ago. Today there are almost 2,000.

I have seen the panic: long store shelves completely bare of toilet paper; pasta and rice stocks wiped out. I have also seen the blithe indifference to the danger, in a video of a crowded Florida beach during spring break. College students milled about in close proximity to total strangers.

I have two thoughts, and there is a connection to knee pain, and getting yourself in the right frame of mind to win a long battle against what seems like a formidable foe.

First, this is a time to make decisions based on reason, not emotion:

This virus is only rarely a death sentence. Many mild cases aren’t being counted in the tallies of total cases because of poor testing. That skews the “case fatality rate” misleadingly higher. In South Korea, whose widespread testing has been praised, I recently saw a death rate of 0.7 percent, which means 7 people in 1,000 die. Many of those who don't make it are older or have underlying health problems.

One thing to take some solace in: there are either no, or very few, children under the age of 10 who are dying.

Yet this epidemic remains a very, very serious problem. A lot of people, young and old, are winding up in the hospital and are being put on ventilators to help them breathe. This is not a run-of-the-mill flu, and that cannot be overstated.

The nature of this crisis threatens to overwhelm the health care system in America. We don’t have enough ventilators, enough masks, enough tests. Our government, sadly, wasted a couple of months when it knew the virus was spreading abroad and when it could have been preparing.

Second, a for-profit health care system, like the one in the U.S., is the worst possible one to have at a time like this:

Americans who feel secure knowing they have employer-paid health insurance should pause and think again. What if they lose their job, as so many are now? Or what about the tens of millions of people who don’t have health insurance, who will avoid getting tested and try not to go to the hospital to avoid being saddled with a $34,000 bill they can’t pay?

They may be in the Target where you’re buying your groceries. They may be delivering that Amazon box to your doorstep, even if they’re sick, because they can’t afford to take a day off. They may contribute to the spread of the virus because they are effectively outside the health care system.

This is tragic, insane really (as I’ve said before) for a nation this rich to have health care that only works for part of its population. We really need to fix that. We need to take care of everyone. In addition to that, we can have an extra layer of private insurance, if people really want that.

In the meantime, much like conquering knee pain, it’s to our advantage to take a positive attitude toward beating this virus. Right now life is surreal. We’re living through what feels like a bad movie. But we shouldn’t panic. The road ahead may be tough at times, but we’re tougher.