5 July 2020: Reducing COVID-19 deaths

Every day, over 1,000 Americans die from COVID-19 because Donald Trump is President instead of Michael Pence. Even with a new president starting on 20 January 221, this may total 250,000 unnecessary deaths of Americans. As a pathologist, I am sickened about this needless loss of life because our President is a public health menace. For this reason, I am calling on Donald Trump to resign and urging others to act similarly.

I grew up in the generation after the Holocaust. When I read and studied about it during my formative years, I swore that I would not stand by and do nothing while innocents died.

It is important to me to act as responsibly as I can in the face of this crisis. I know that my actions will likely not be determinative. But when I reflect on the massive American deaths from COVID-19, I will know that I tried to do something about it, instead of just waiting.

I also know something that many of you do not. What we do has an impact, even if unnoticed. Every grain of sand dropped on a sandpile changes its internal structure slightly, and at some point, when enough grains of sand accumulate, the sandpile will topple. We cannot know which grain of sand will be enough, but all are important. Thus, we should act. Doing nothing does not help. This view of how nature works is called self organized criticality, and was developed by the late Danish physicist Per Bak, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_Bak, https://www.amazon.com/How-Nature-Works-self-organized-criticality/dp/038798738X.

So, you are welcome to ignore my efforts or to ridicule them. But you may want to think what your contribution should be, or could be, to help end this tragedy.

3 July 2020: COVID-19 thoughts

This recent New York Times article about contact tracing raises a few issues.

First, it is interesting how people are offended at disclosing their presence at a party but I have not heard about difficulties in contact tracing for reportable sexually transmitted disease (of note, STD tracing experts are now working on COVID-19 tracing).

Second, although I understand (but don't approve) of people going to large parties even though prohibited, I cannot understand people who know they are sick going to these parties:

* The party’s host, who was showing signs of being sick at the time, later tested positive for the virus
* The first person from the party identified with the disease, was coughing and not wearing a face covering at the event.

What should we do to prevent sick people from going out in public?