This past week, millions of Americans joined together in total defiance of all public health advice for another round of infecting and killing their loved ones, while ensuring that the nation’s medical professionals will face several more months of risky, grueling, emotionally draining labor trying to keep a country full of heedless jerks and credulous conspiracy-mongers alive. Many doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are increasingly hopeless and disillusioned. Gone are the 7’oclock cheers and “Thank you essential workers” signs in every window. That fleeting solidarity has been replaced by a cold, selfish indifference to the staggering and seemingly pointless sacrifices these heroic workers continue to make on our behalf. And many of them are wondering how much longer they can keep it up. Never has this been more clear than it was over the long Thanksgiving weekend. While many Americans did the sensible — if heart-wrenching — thing and stayed home or limited their gatherings to small, pre-existing “pods,” more than 8 million people traveled through airports the day before Thanksgiving. In one poll, 40 percent of respondents told researchers they were planning on attending a large, in-person gathering. All of this while a record 90,000 people were already hospitalized with COVID-19, and public health professionals begged people to stay home so as not to exacerbate the problem. How can people do this, knowing that their actions risk their own lives and the lives of others? It would be one thing if the incredible, worldwide scientific effort to create a vaccine for this terrible virus was failing and there was no hope on the bleak horizon. But it looks like multiple vaccines will be deployed beginning next month, with the possibility of a return to some kind of normalcy by the end of next year. The end of this thing is now tantalizingly in sight. This is not to minimize what people have been through, or the misery that awaits those who hunker down for the winter, still cruelly shorn of nearly all social contact and ordinary joys. But the reality is that many Americans are now consciously choosing to spread death and suffering over finding the strength to endure for a few more months. And they aren’t just harming themselves: They are putting unimaginable strain on the country’s health-care system, as burned out doctors, nurses, and staff ask themselves why they are martyring themselves on behalf of such a venal society. One viral immunologist told me that, “I feel upset with these folks because this is inevitably going to cause more death and harm and not just to them but others who did stay home and followed guidelines.” He added that much of the blame rests with national and state political leaders determined to play down the gravity of the problem so they could rush economic re-openings. A palliative medical counselor said that the staff at her facility “is wonderful but furious when it is the patients’ reckless behavior that puts them in the ICU for COVID.” Fury gives way to exhaustion and resignation. “They still provide superhuman care,” she says, “but it’s only human to be frustrated.” Health-care workers are not in the army. No one is forcing them to suit up and plunge themselves into another 16-hour shift of watching a deadly virus suffocate people to death. There is no law that says they must carry on even when COVID patients show up convinced the whole thing was a plot designed to harm President Trump’s re-election prospects. Health-care providers know perfectly well that a lot of the patients they are treating scoffed at the danger and shrugged off expert guidelines and did whatever they wanted anyway.
This kind of behavior is evil, selfish, and cartoonishly destructive. It fills me with incoherent rage. This is a country full of people who have completely lost their way. One of the most infuriating things about it all is that the gob-smackingly selfish actions of your friends and neighbors will serve to counteract the sacrifices of those who have spent the past 9 months trying to do the right thing.
It means your friends, parents, and grandparents could get infected with this disease and then die from it, all because millions of your selfish fellow citizens plainly lacked the fortitude to weather temporary adversity, and because the depraved ghouls currently in charge of the federal government refused to spend the money needed to help the riskiest places — bars, restaurants, and gyms — stay closed and financially whole. We know now where this is headed over the next few months. Hospitals will be taxed beyond capacity, spiking the death rate from COVID and delaying or canceling care for tens of thousands of others. There will be mobile morgues and mass graves and countless Zoom funerals and an entire generation of health-care workers with permanent emotional trauma. People will show up to the ER after car accidents and heart attacks and allergic reactions and die waiting. The overall coronavirus death toll, now at more than 266,000, will surpass 400,000 or more by March and could ultimately reach half a million or more. The economic fallout could last years. So much of this suffering will ultimately have been needless. Tens of thousands will perish weeks or even days before they could have been saved. More and more frontline workers will succumb. And it is all because so many of our fellow citizens have revealed themselves to be both pathetic and decadent. It is truly hard to believe that the millions of people who are too weak-willed to go a year without sitting down for a meal inside a restaurant are the descendants of the brave men and women who fought and won World War II with five years of painful sacrifices and solidarity. A lot of Americans circa 2020 wouldn’t have made it three weeks past Pearl Harbor before protesting rationing and demanding our surrender to the Axis powers, and they deserve neither our sympathy nor the extraordinary heroism of doctors, nurses, and staff in hospitals and care homes across the country. Nick Note: I am in pain as i am sure you are. People will not wear the only mask and filter Biolab style that will protect them because they are “ugly”. I HAD TO GET EXPORT LICENSES BECAUSE THEY ARE REGARDED AS TOP SECRET MILITARY GERM WARFARE BIOLAB EQUIPMENT. Baby boomers the most at risk will not isolate because they want to go grocery shopping? What the fuck have we come to. I will not give up. I make masks and filters that will stop the virus dead and people tell me they are ugly. I have established protocols after massive research for vitamins (many used in Coivd units at hospitals) that MAY help. And Ozone filtration that will kill the virus dead. And they tell me the ozone smells bad. Please will not isolate at home… and I hear we are a close family and the mask will scare the grand kids. Because of my research and publicity that shows the toilet paper and coffee filter paper masks do not work my emails go into spam or do not get sent at all. and i am banned on social media. I have been accused of scaring people for profit but i give away most of the things we have designed and manufactured. I will never recoup the hundreds of thousands of dollars invested it PPE products. AND i am a villain….. REALLY! I will never be stopped nor defeated. I will speak truth and do what i know works as i watch the medical workers reduced to tears as hospitals overflow with people suffocating to death and help supply refrigerated containers to store the bodies piling up all around me.