Tag: common sense

Has everyone lost their minds?

I just want to start off by saying WHOAH people! What is happening to everybody? Where did logic go? Where did common sense and understanding go? In just the past 24 hours I have seen people finger pointing, yelling at each other, shouting about conspiracy theories, threatening others, protesting, and panicking. That is a ton of unfriendly verbs right there. There is nothing good that is going to come from any of it. What’s simmering underneath all of it? : the pandemic and the politics swirling swirling around it. Let me take a minute and give you my honest perspective on it. Let me also be clear that what I am going to say is based on facts and personal observations. I am not here to sway you, convince you or otherwise change your direction. I just want to give you something to consider. If it happens to help you press pause on panic and anger, fantastic! If it doesn’t, it needs to be said anyway.

Ok here goes. I am here to tell you that Covid 19 is a real virus in the Corona virus family, which is the same family of viruses that cause the common cold. As you know, there is an infinite variety of viral mutations that can cause a cold and thus, we will probably never have a vaccine for it. Some of us will go down like a wildabeast for weeks with congestion, trouble breathing, coughing and even fevers. Some of us will get a little runny nose for a few days to a week and that’s the end of it. A small group of high risk people may even die from it. Now here comes Covid 19, a corona virus. It can mutate like other Corona viruses. It is ridiculously contagious like a cold. The vast majority of people that get it will have bad cold symptoms. Some people will be completely symptom free. A small subset will get seriously ill and may even die. This is crazy scary right? Of course it is. That’s a natural response. But, let’s put it in perspective. There is a certain subset of unfortunate people that are more at risk for everything due to comorbid conditions. These are the folks that need to always be careful, whether there is a pandemic going on or not. When you do the actual math on the covid thing, with verifiable numbers, the death rate is extremely small. I get it, even one death is too many. Of course it is. I am just saying that it is my opinion that our reaction and response to Covid perhaps should be in better proportion to the actual statistical risk it poses. We deal with many infectious and terrible things that can kill people every single year and they have not instigated a world mess of this proportion. I seem to recall complaining about the “latest shitty upper respiratory illness” as it blows through the world every year. In my lifetime alone we have had AIDS, H1N1, SARS, ebola, and the year round outbreaks of flu. I have news for you. AIDS and the flu have not miraculously disappeared, just because we are not talking about them. They are not the cool kids anymore, but I can remember being inundated with all kinds of bits of information each time one of these outbreaks started and feeling momentarily overwhelmed, but then we all went on. We didn’t shut down the economy and add financial despair to the shoulder weight of an already distressed country. We didn’t wipe out all other news and saturate all of our overwhelmed receptors relentlessly for months.

Let me be clear. I know this virus is real. I work in three different hospital systems. I have seen everything from the icu patients to the asymptomatic patients and everyone in between. Half of my family has had it….all have survived thank goodness but other people I know haven’t. One of my favorite people in the world died of Covid. But guess what, every time I have found myself scratching my head on why someone died, I realized after investigation that they actually had a comorbid condition that adversely affected their Covid path. It just makes sense. These cases we hear about in which someone died unexpectedly, I am willing to bet that the vast majority of the time there was an underlying condition as well. Just because we don’t hear about it or the person didn’t know, doesn’t make it not true. I think in the case of Covid, it’s all the things we don’t know or feel sure of that get to us the most. We hope a vaccine is coming, but it won’t be universally available for awhile yet. When it is, I am sure that some people will refuse it like they refuse everything else, even though we have all been clamoring for one for months. How does that make sense? It’s like we want to be able to control a decision about something, anything, just to say that we did whether it is good for us or not since we all feel so out of control.

So what am I really saying is that I think the whole pandemic has provided us with a view into how quickly everything can go wrong with misleading information. It has showed us how forced panic is not the way to go to convince people to follow guidelines. It has showed us that leaving people to their own devices without clear communication leads to nothing but chaos. It has showed us that when we come at people from all sides with negative and oppressive tactics, we don’t even allow them the opportunity to make good decisions. We have got to get it together and do things and think things based on actual facts and reintroduce common sense into this global scenario. Otherwise, we are just not going to make it through this.

Hang in there.

Dr. Katz

How’re we doin?

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Hi everybody! Shelter in place day 1. How’re we doin? I am feelin the panic from everyone. I even felt a little creeped out last night when I went for my walk and suddenly my phone was overtaken by a reminder of the executive order…complete with a notice about unnecessary travel being prohibited. It literally gave me the chills for a second, like I was in one of those weird future dystopia movies or something. Then, I shook it off. You know why? Because it is not really any different than what we were supposed to be doing anyway! I know what you’re going to say. Hey! Before we could still get take out and go to the mall, etc. Hey! This is even a bigger crush on small business. Yes. Yes. All that is true. My business is being severely affected too. I can’t do any surgery, unless it’s an absolute emergency. I can’t see any people that are sick who actually need me. They have to go through the ER or stay at home. I can basically only see well patients or OB patients, if I can even get them to come in. I am not immune to this process. The scary flipside is, that I also have to risk exposure to COVID everyday. If a COVID positive OB patient comes in, we still have to figure out how to deliver them safely with the least exposure to the least amount of people and keep their newborns safe as well.

However, if you think about it, we were already supposed to be restricting unnecessary trips and travel. We really should have been following our social distancing, not going to restaurants, not going to the movies, not going to the mall anyway. There was no dire need to get our nails done or go to the tanning salon. These are not basic life needs. Before you get all ruffly, let me explain what I mean about basic life needs. They are things that are life or death dependent. Your life or death does not depend on how brown you are or how good your nails look or if you got that extra candle or how gray your hair is ( Trust me, I am battling that one as we speak). It just doesn’t, if we are being honest. I am of the opinion that if we were truly following instructions in the first place, there would have been no need to issue an executive order. (Having said that, I also get that a politician’s need to appear like they are actively doing something in a crisis may, in fact, supersede the actual need for action.) If we hadn’t panicked and hoarded all paper products, in reaction to a virus whose main symptoms are NOT GI symptoms, except for a small percentage, those of us that have been working like crazy might have had an option to wipe our asses besides the wipe with the left, eat and shake hands with the right method. C’mon people! I am looking at all the fear-mongering, crazy Facebook posts. They are unnecessary. They are not helpful. They are not helping anyone get through this thing.

I took it upon myself to break down the governor’s executive order announcement into a less than five minute summary. I will do the same right now for you. Here are the main bullet points. Stay at home whenever possible. If you have an essential job (defined on the Michigan.gov website), you can go to and from work. Essential businesses are still open. You can go to get gas for your car. You can go to the pharmacy or grocery store. You can still get money. You can still go to the doctor or to the hospital if you need to. You can still go outside. You can still go for a walk. Maintain your social distance of 6 feet at all times. No crowds. Have meetings remotely. All your basic needs can still be met. Amazon is not shutting down like rumors have said.(JK, she didn’t really address that…lol..but it is true.) Don’t panic. Don’t hoard. That is it in nutshell…in two minutes or less. Let’s just all screw our heads back on properly and dig into our common sense reserves and we will get through this together! Have a fantastic day everyone!

Dr. Katz