Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Friday issued a shelter-in-place order for his state effective Saturday at 5 p.m. through April 7. Illinois joins other states and municipalities issuing similar orders to slow the spread of COVID-19. It’s an overwhelming disruption to people’s lives for which most of us have no reference. A friend’s mother was a British war bride who sheltered in the London Underground during The Blitz. She’d know. But she’s no longer here to call us wimps at afternoon tea.
Pritzker brought to his announcement Dr. Emily Landon, chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine. Landon put the predicament medical professionals in perspective. She’s been sheltering in place with her family for days and directing emergency efforts from home.
There’s no slack in our health care system, Landon said. No hospitals standing empty for emergencies. During the 1918 pandemic, St. Louis shut itself down, she said. But Philadelphia held a parade for departing Doughboys. A week later, its hospitals were overrun. St. Louis fared measurably better.
Landon made the need for sheltering personal:
There’s no vaccine or readily available antiviral to help stem the tide. All we have to slow the spread is distance. Social distance. And if we let every single patient with this infection infect three more people and then each of them infect two or three more people, there won’t be a hospital bed when my mother can’t breathe very well, or when yours is coughing too much.
The problem is, such measures don’t sound as heroic as sheltering from The Blitz. But that’s not how Landon sees it:
In short, without taking drastic measures, the healthy and optimistic among us will doom the vulnerable. We have to fight this fire before it grows too high. These extreme restrictions may seem, in the end, a little anti-climactic. Because it’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world while watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right, nothing happens. Yeah, a successful shelter-in-place means that you’re going to feel like it was all for nothing. And you’d be right. Because nothing means that nothing happened to your family.
Or a piece by Fiona Lowenstein in this morning’s New York Times:
I’m 26. I don’t have any prior autoimmune or respiratory conditions. I work out six times a week, and abstain from cigarettes. I thought my role in the current health crisis would be as an ally to the elderly and compromised. Then, I was hospitalized for Covid-19.
After a few days with symptoms and gasping for air, she was in a hospital bed on oxygen. Staff told her there was another 30-year-old in the next room, “otherwise healthy, but who had also experienced serious trouble breathing.” Lowenstein lives in New York City.
[h/t DB]
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.