By ignoring Covid, Repubs are paradoxically causing more long-term economic damage.
My thoughts after reading about a young healthy, unvaccinated, 42 year-old football coach who spent 72 days in the hospital, most of it intubated in the ICU, now encouraging people to get vaccinated:
As I work in a hospital, I cannot even begin to imagine the price tag of his hospital bill that someone is going to have to absorb, only to think of how so many of our hospitals are overloaded (and will remain so for the foreseeable future) with patients requiring a magnitude of care and costs they cannot hope to afford.
If the primary justification for “opening back up“, or “staying open“ is that we are saving the economy (God knows what kind of conscience can prioritize money over human lives), how foolish can such people be, not to see that this policy is costing the economy more, not less.
It has become clear that the only path towards stopping this pandemic is by mass vaccination. Waiting for everybody to get it and have the virus burn itself out it’s not going to happen. People can get it twice, and probably more over time. Not vaxxing further increases the duration and danger of the pandemic by encouraging additional variants to form. Witness the Delta variant, causing severe illness in children and young healthy adults. This was not happening last year.
Not vaxxing equals longer pandemic with increased virulency of variants. The Republican plan of ignoring the virus guarantees it stays around longer and becomes more dangerous.
The longer pandemic these people are creating is costing our businesses more in the long run and will cause more bankruptcies than if we worked hard together to shut down the virus by adhering to an actual plan formulated by medical experts.
It has also become clear that this is becoming an increasing drain on our health systems, with our hospitals getting overloaded with sick, unvaccinated and often uninsured patients, costing our hospitals and ultimately the taxpayers millions and probably billions more dollars. The Republican plan is not a fiscally sensible plan.
I have recently been learning about fiduciary responsibility within a hospital setting, and I’m realizing that this responsibility can be argued both from an economic standpoint and from a patient care standpoint, and these two facets can be at odds with each other.
In the case of Covid, these variables are not at odds, however, and the fiduciary responsibility of our elected officials is to care for both the health of the economy and the health of our people. Ignoring the pandemic, not masking, not sheltering, not vaccinating, is a failure to live up to of that responsibility from both from a financial standpoint and from a human/health standpoint.
Republicans I know seem to pride themselves on their longterm fiscal sensibilities, yet here, they are all walking blindly. As their collective does not appear to value human life over their precious economy, perhaps they can at least realize that their current approach is hurting the economy more than it is helping.
= new reply since forum marked as read
