Here’s the latest news from the pandemic.
Hospitals have become Covid fortresses
In March 2020, an episode of a Fox network television show called “The Resident” appeared that was about a lethal fungus spreading through a fictional hospital. In the show, the hospital staff go to great pains to try to get rid of the fungal infection without causing panic, or revealing their own mistakes.
One of the writers behind the episode is named Daniela Lamas. Around the time it aired, the story started to feel like reality for her. That’s because in addition to being a TV show script writer, she’s an intensive-care doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Reality was following an alternative script, in which the coronavirus was the arch-villain. Swathed in personal protective equipment, she was taking care of patients with a previously unknown disease, Covid-19. Hundreds across Massachusetts became sick with the disease, piling into the hospital in unforeseen numbers.
“There was initially this sort of odd feeling of, you know, truth being stranger than fiction,” says Lamas, a lung specialist at the Brigham, “and sort of feeling slow to kind of realize that this was real.”
At the same time Covid was transforming the interior of the hospital, forcing staff to use rooms and buildings in new ways, while creating distance between patients and caregivers, and between the hospitals themselves and the communities they serve.
On this week’s episode of the Prognosis podcast we chart the gulf that’s arisen between hospitals and the public. As people are bombarded with misinformation about vaccines and treatments, a divide has developed that doctors are finding increasingly difficult to navigate.
Some patients “come with a different mental model about this disease, and they come with a different belief system about this disease,” says Jim Souza, a lung specialist in Idaho, one of the worst-hit states. “And as they do that, they’re coming with a bit more hostility.”
Hospitals have long occupied a singular place in the community and in the imagination. They’re a place where discoveries are made, where friends and relatives come to be with the sick, where medical miracles can happen.
But that’s changing. Increasingly, hospitals are becoming fortresses that must carefully limit who enters and exits. No matter how many gowns and masks they have now, workers are feeling overburdened with caring for Covid patients who may stay for months needing highly intensive care. Miracles are getting harder and harder to perform. And many health-care workers now feel less trusted than ever before.—John Lauerman
Track the vaccines
In total, 98 doses have been given for every 100 people around the world—but the distribution has been lopsided. Countries and regions with the highest incomes are getting vaccinated more than 10 times faster than those with the lowest. We’ve updated our vaccine tracker to allow you to explore vaccine rates vs Covid cases in a number of countries. See the latest here.
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November 16, 2021 at 07:30PM
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The Gulf Between Hospitals and the Public - Bloomberg
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