[Nader]

Everyone has an opinion. So do I. Which I'll try to keep to myself. But I also have experience with this virus, and I can share that. I'm a hospital physician, practicing over 20 years, and in the epicenter of the U.S. pandemic. I've hospitalized multiple suspected and confirmed COVID-19 patients. Some were unsuspected (they came in for unrelated, non-pulmonary medical illnesses, but spiked a fever while in the hospital and tested positive). Most were elderly with mild/moderate disease, one was gasping for breath until he died 2 days later. That's just my experience, in one week of 11 hour shifts. Our group has 20 other physicians, so you can extrapolate.

What scares me, is that we're seeing more young, previously healthy patients get sick. Several ended up in the ICU on the ventilator. And our hospital isn't as hard hit as a neighboring one. I get occasional reports from them, and it sounds like a real crisis situation over there. They have run out of ICU beds for anything other than COVID, so we get their overflow. I could tell you some pretty scary stories about what we're seeing, but I won't.

Bigger picture is that what you've heard is true, the hospitals can't absorb the multitude of critically ill patients that are to come. Care will be rationed, and hard decisions will need to be made; does the demented 85 year old get the last ventilator, or the 35 year old mom with young children? Actually, that decision shouldn't be hard to make. But from what I've dealt with in my career, you'd be surprised at the selfishness of some patients and their families.

Speaking of rationing care, it has already begun; hospitals are already cancelling scheduled elective procedures to save beds. They do this because no hospital has any reasonable amount of built-in vacant capacity to deal with. At baseline, we're already inundated with a large geriatric population in their 80s and 90s that's living longer with chronic disease because modern medicine keeps them alive against their best interest, who are consuming mind-boggling amounts of medical resources. Add to this the massive population of Boomers who are knocking at our healthcare gates with their own burgeoning medical issues, and you have a healthcare system at the breaking point. Throw in a pandemic, and, well, you'll all see soon enough...