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In the USA: MNs discuss what's happening in your state

3 replies

Womanlywiles · 21/03/2020 16:31

I am in the Seattle suburbs. Our state had the first cases of Coronavirus and COVID-19 in the nation. The nursing home where 35 died is about 2 miles away. Our local hospital (also about 2 miles) away was one of the first, if not the first, in the nation to be dealing with this. Our state leadership (Governor Jay Inslee) and our county executives have all been speaking as one voice and are basing their decisions on science and advice from pandemic experts. They wanted to do aggressive testing from the start but were prevented by the incompetency of the CDC (Center of Diease Control) at the Federal level. Patty Murray one of our state Senates is pushing for an inquiry into the criminal mess that our testing situation descended into. We do have drive thru testing sites up and running about 10 days ago, and processed locally. Priority for first responders. So, we are behind the curve in terms of testing but have been social distancing and staying home as much as possible for weeks. Big employers listened to public gealth experts and had their employees work at home (such as Microsoft and Amazon). My daughter was sent home from the University of Washington in Seattle about 2 weeks ago now. All the schools statewide have been closed for 10 days. Everything is very deserted. Although we are short of toliet paper and cleaning products in the shops when I went to Safeway on Wednesday it was fully stocked so we have plenty of food. We have not been experiencing people buying and hoarding everything in sight. My husband is a doctor but in private practice and does not work in a hospital, so only sees patients one by one who gets and his staff are screening carefully. Already we are being warned about the hospitals having to triage patients. On Wednesday a conference call with 250 professionals/leaders of all the local hospitals discussed rationing care and triage guidelines so that decision would not fall on one doctor or nurse. Our course we also do not have enough PPE as already burned through the stockpile. Trump has finally reacted and companies are making huge quantities, but they may not be with us for weeks and of course we do not have enough ventilators. Our entire state population is less than greater London (I think we are about 8 million) and about 3 million live in the greater Seattle area. We are probably right where the UK is right now in terms of the curve (in the "foothills" as one UK dr described it). Clearly there are going to be huge amounts of avoidable deaths because we (the UK and USA) were not prepared, our national leaders failed us by not following South Korea and Singapore who had already had SARs and knew how bad it can get. They had prepared by stockpiling sufficiently and also reacted quickly and decisively to find those with the virus and locking down their exposed social networks.

OP posts:
Nononoandno · 21/03/2020 16:32

m.youtube.com/watch?v=tQD4B_hmdvo

Womanlywiles · 21/03/2020 16:32

Here is an article from the NYT about our local hospital.
www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/us/coronavirus-kirkland-hospital-seattle.amp.html

OP posts:
Womanlywiles · 21/03/2020 16:44

Nono I am so shocked listening to that dr. Noone is going out if they don't have to in this area. I have been home for weeks. I really feel for the UK because the numbers of deaths are going to be horrendous, much worse than Italy.

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