If doctors can’t follow the guidelines, what hope is there?
At least 17 anesthesiologist residents and a fellow at one of the premier university hospital systems in Florida contracted COVID-19 earlier this month after attending a private party together, according to hospital insiders and internal documents.
The outbreak at University of Florida Health occurred after a party at a private home, according to people familiar with the situation. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they said UF Health prohibits employees from speaking to reporters without authorization.
The cases included 14 junior residents, two senior residents, a fellow and an administrative employee, the email said, noting that it was providing the “latest data from yesterday.” It said the anesthesiology department “wishes them well and a speedy return to good health.” It was unclear whether or when the employees were returning to work with patients.
The UF Health outbreak illustrates the difficulties of stemming the spread of the pandemic, when even trained health care professionals can be sickened from a private party in Florida — one of the nation’s hot spots for the virus — after explicit warnings about the risks from social gatherings.
A copy of Morey’s email was obtained byFresh Take Florida, a news service operated by the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
In response to questions, UF Health’s chief communications officer, Melanie Fridl Ross, said in a statement: “UF Health educates its faculty, staff and students on best practices to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 on and off-duty. Our goal is to minimize the spread of the illness on our campus and in our community, recognizing that it’s impossible to prevent all cases given the way pandemics naturally work.”
In his email, Morey also reminded hospital employees not to come to work sick and to wash their hands frequently. The message did not mention a party or say anything about social gatherings, such as parties. Morey did not respond to emails and a voice message left at his office over days.
They just had to party, I guess.
It isn’t just young residents. Read this extremely well-reported piece in Mother Jones about a highly respected Stanford scientist:
Stanford University scientist John Ioannidis has declared in study after study that the coronavirus is not that big of a threat, emboldening opponents of economic shutdowns — and infuriating critics who see fundamental errors in his work.
But even before the epidemiologist had any of that data in hand, he and an elite group of scientists tried to convince President Donald Trump that locking down the country would be the real danger.
In late March, as COVID-19 cases overran hospitals overseas, Ioannidis tried to organize a meeting at the White House where he and a small band of colleagues would caution the president against “shutting down the country for [a] very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this,” according to a statement Ioannidis submitted on the group’s behalf. Their goal, the statement said, was “to both save more lives and avoid serious damage to the US economy using the most reliable data.”
Although the meeting did not happen, Ioannidis believed their message had reached the right people. Within a day of him sending it to the White House, Trump announced that he wanted the country reopened by Easter. “I think our ideas have inflitrated [sic] the White House regardless,” Ioannidis told his collaborators on March 28, in one of dozens of emails that BuzzFeed News obtained through public records requests.
Read the whole thing. Scientists disagree and that’s to be expected. But there’s a lot more to this than that and it’s highly disturbing.:
And the group’s attempt to convey these preliminary ideas directly to the White House is highly unusual for scientists, said Sheila Jasanoff, a Harvard Kennedy School professor who studies the role of science in politics.
“It creates the impression that the work that the scientists are intending to do will be shaped by a political purpose, maybe even before they have started doing the work,” Jasanoff said. Their decision to push an untested theory to influence federal policy, she added, went “against the ethos of science.”