Print

[YanTing]

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE

Off topic, but I believe this letter to the editor, which appeared in today’s Chicago Tribune, will be of interest to members of this forum.

Your Voice

Early days of pandemic

With regards to those in Congress criticizing Dr. Anthony Fauci and others in regards to the pandemic: It’s critically important to remember the conditions early on at the time decisions had to be made.

As a physician who worked in several Chicago-area hospitals throughout the pandemic, I can attest to that: These hospitals were filled to the brim with COVID-19 patients. Any additional patients would have been left in the halls or in the emergency room, waiting for a bed, nearly uncared for. Thus, plans were made for McCormick Place to be turned into a makeshift hospital — or, really, a way station to the morgue. There were so many COVID-19 patients who were so sick that physicians could barely tell them apart.

We ran out of critical supplies; for example, dialysis had to be rationed. Hospital personnel were stressed to the breaking point; in some hospitals, physicians such as nephrologists covered in the intensive care unit, where they were wholly untrained for the task. Hospitals in some areas kept refrigerated trucks outside to hold bodies.

Allowing COVID-19 to spread unchecked throughout the community would have led to large numbers of infected people without effective treatment available and even without hospital rooms. And alarmingly, no one knew when the virus would ebb, or when or even if there would ever be a vaccine or effective treatment. For all we knew at the time, there was no end in sight; perhaps, even a Black Death-like toll loomed. (If you think that’s an exaggeration, you were not working in a hospital.)

That was the context in which decisions were made about masks, distancing, schools, lockdowns and the like. Not surprisingly, pretty much every country in the world acted in the same way, trying to prevent huge numbers of deaths.

Sweden, an exception, was more lax and suffered four to 10 times the COVID-19 death rate of its fellow Scandinavian countries in the first year. Sweden then changed course.

But only in the United States do we have congressional hearings in which some lawmakers call for the jailing of our most respected health care providers who did the best they could with limited information in hellacious circumstances and came to the same conclusions as other experts around the world.

Fauci estimated that COVID-19 precautions saved 1 million lives here.

In the absence of political self-interest and/or self-aggrandizement, we thank those who helped save those lives.