A Doctor’s Dark Year(newyorker.com)

78 pointsby wglb5 tahun yang lalu69 comments

https://www.newyorker.com/science/medical-dispatch/a-doctors-dark-year

74 comments

Fomite5 tahun yang lalu

As an epidemiologist, this has been the hardest year of my life. I've had a couple complete, "curled up in the stairwell having a breakdown" breakdowns, etc. and I'm relatively safe.

The sheer, unrelenting stress this has put on doctors, nurses, EMTs and other hospital staff is going to have long term consequences. Morale among those who graduated into the teeth of this is really bad.

perardi5 tahun yang lalu

“Fomite”: name checks out for an epidemiologist.

But then seriously, my partner is a paramedic in a large North American city. He has been, to put in bluntly, lucky, because this non-American city implemented a reasonable sick plan, and he serves a chunk of the city that has not been hard-hit. (Which is to say: no warehouses, no food processing.) But just the constant hyper-vigilant PPE dance wears and wears you down. Nothing is “simple” now; the simplest slip-and-fall becomes a scene out of the Andromeda Strain, because you don’t want to get infected, and you certainly don’t want to pass something on when you are harboring the virus but not presenting obvious symptoms. (Too bad said city also had one hell of a testing bottleneck, and you couldn’t just test test test to make sure the front-line staff is virus-free.)

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

throwawayemdee5 tahun yang lalu

Just want to comment with an alternate point of view, and in no way intend to demean to diminish the emotional impact like those described in the article. Just how I feel:

I'm an intensive care physician and also function part-time as a hospitalist (acute care medical floor patients). Yes, there have been some stressful, uncertain, and fear-driven moments. But I also chose to work at a place that has a physician-led and supportive administration, and I investigated those things as part of the interview process. We had adequate staffing, a robust peer-support system (look up the "second victim" phenomenon), and my colleagues and I seem to have good coping mechanisms in place, which I assumed doctors in these kinds of specialties needed as a basic requirement.

Bottom line, I'm doing just fine, and my inpatient physician colleagues, with some exceptions, report the same. This is a difficult job at baseline without COVID. It didn't change my approach at all.

nexuist5 tahun yang lalu

> But I also chose to work at a place that has a physician-led and supportive administration

Your positive experience seems to confirm that working in a place with good management has a positive effect on employee morale, although I'm not sure anyone was questioning that in the first place. It is however uplifting to note that workplaces like yours exist.

I also think it depends on the area you serve. I imagine for many hospitals COVID was a case of "do everything right and everything still goes wrong" - especially when you reach max capacity, it doesn't matter how good of a doctor you are, you can't heal people with your bare hands. Likewise, it doesn't matter how well you use PPE or social distance or stay at home if thousands of others in your area ignore the safety measures and get each other sick, and it doesn't matter how much you care about keeping people safe if your local or federal governments don't take the issue seriously. This has been a huge stress point not just for doctors but for everyone I think, the knowledge that so much misery and death could have been avoided if we just did what we knew we should do when this mess started.

throwawaemdee5 tahun yang lalu

You're absolutely right. I think a lot of the stress-related stories we're seeing do depend on the location, demographics, and a ton of other factors; a large city academic center might have a lot higher load and resource stress than a smaller hospital.

But overall, I just like to point out to people that some of us in medicine and nursing are doing just fine through all of this. A lot of people assume that we're all miserable because we work in the acute hospital/ICU setting.

perardi5 tahun yang lalu

At the risk of minimizing the amazing efforts of doctors this past hell year: spare a thought or two for nurses.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/nyregion/filipino-nurses-...

Been a hard year for nurses. (And respiratory therapists. And paramedics.)

munificent5 tahun yang lalu

What a harrowing, intense read about an incredibly strong person.

raunak5 tahun yang lalu

https://archive.is/hEoUL

mrlagmer5 tahun yang lalu

It is interesting to read stuff like this. We never had it bad in Australia so when you read something like this it makes you thankful for how we have handled it. Amazing that we will have 80,000 people at a football game on Sunday.

taxicabjesus5 tahun yang lalu

One speculation I've read is that Australian/Japan/New Zealand's very-bad 2019 flu season was SARS-CoV-2 before it could be diagnosed. My understanding is that most cases of "flu" are suspected, not laboratory-confirmed.

Just found this October 4, 2019 NY Times story: Australia Just Had a Bad Flu Season. That May Be a Warning for the U.S., https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/04/health/flu-australia-amer...

From this NY times article: "This year’s Australian outbreak began in April [2019], two months earlier than usual, and persisted into October."

COVID-19 cases in the US probably started November-ish. COVID-19 was found in US blood samples from December 2019.

I had a day with an odd headache sometime around December 2019 or January 2020. I suspect I had a case of #EarlyCovid. Lots of other people in North America were super-sick in November/December 2019 and January 2020. Others have been using the hashtag for longer than I: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23EarlyCovid

Edit: At least 4 downvotes in 16 minutes. This indicates many of you do not believe SARS-CoV-2 could have been spreading before it was isolated in Wuhan China in December 2019, or that I and many others might have had a case of non-diagnosed SARS-CoV-2 before tests became available in the US in March 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...

"A September 2020 review noted "The possibility that the COVID-19 infection had already spread to Europe at the end of last year is now indicated by abundant, even if partially circumstantial, evidence", including pneumonia case numbers and radiology in France and Italy in November and December." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...

What does it mean if the COVID-19 timeline is wrong?

taxicabjesus5 tahun yang lalu

(note to self: comment above quickly went to -4, then saw at +2, now at -1, so at least 14 votes.)

projectileboy5 tahun yang lalu

I’m not totally sure why you’re being downvoted, it’s an interesting question. My niece in Seattle had a very bad “flu” for about three weeks early last year, well before the initial wave in the Pacific Northwest. I hope we will eventually learn a bit more about how and where this started and how and where it spread, so that we can do a better job next time. (Putting aside the obvious ways the US and other parts of the world chose to deny reality, there still is much to learn.)

tharkun__5 tahun yang lalu

I can completely believe this. Unfortunately we can't prove any of this but personally I think my team was at least exposed to Covid in early 2020 as well. We had a guy in our (small) team room out sick from Thursday to Monday and he reported being 'floored' and coughing his lungs out. His SO got the same a few days after. Nobody else really got sick but given the close quarters and what we know about aerosol spread and incubation periods now, I think we were practically bathing in virus soup.

viraptor5 tahun yang lalu

While not impossible, there are a few things that I think would need good explanations:

- labs would get more flu swabs which test negative - there would be enough globally to make someone suspicious

- why did we see only one strain of covid initially if it was already spreading early (and as I understand it the strain hierarchy always points to the Wuhan one on top)

- we haven't seen the cases drop completely without special measures in any country (there's a drop in summer, but only partial) - why was Australia pretty much covid free initially with all the assumed 2019 cases?

taxicabjesus5 tahun yang lalu

1. Flu cases numbers are estimates. Flu cases have disappeared, presumably on account of everyone getting SARS-CoV-2 instead.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/comparing-...

2. Figuring out if a person has a strain requires genetic sequencing of samples that tested positive for generic COVID-19. I don't know when this became possible.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/how-are-covid-19-v...

3. Some populations are healthier than others. I think 'Special measures' are mostly theater.

viraptor5 tahun yang lalu

> 1. Flu cases numbers are estimates. Flu cases have disappeared, presumably on account of everyone getting SARS-CoV-2 instead.

The flu statistics are estimates based on a few sources - some including testing. There's still a number of swabs from people with flu symptoms being tested. In the proposed situation, the labs would register a large number of tests for flu coming back negative for both flu and common cold. There are people whose job is to notice trends like that.

2. It doesn't matter when the testing became possible. If multiple strains existed before, we'd likely see some "sibling" strains and common ancestors to the Wuhan and X strain. Both the siblings and X seem to be absent.

3. If you're ready to put the fall of infections right as the lockdown were implemented to a coincidence / healthy population, then I'm not sure it's even worth discussing the other aspects.

Btw, the context here is Australia. (You posted links to CDC)

taxicabjesus5 tahun yang lalu

I was just found a tab on my phone with this CNN article:

CNN Exclusive: WHO Wuhan mission finds possible signs of wider original outbreak in 2019 - https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/14/health/who-mission-china-intl...

The investigators found evidence of 13 virus strains in Wuhan in December 2019:

> As a result, they were able to gather for the first time 13 different genetic sequences of the SARS-COV-2 virus from December 2019. The sequences, if examined with wider patient data in China across 2019, could provide valuable clues about the geography and timing of the outbreak before December.

> ...

> Prof. Edward Holmes, a virologist at the University of Sydney, in Australia, said: "As there was already genetic diversity in SARS-CoV-2 sequences sampled from Wuhan in December 2019, it is likely that the virus was circulating for a while longer than that month alone."

The point I'm trying to make here is that there's certainly a lot of facets of the pandemic that haven't been properly explained.

flukus5 tahun yang lalu

> One speculation I've read is that Australian/Japan/New Zealand's very-bad 2019 flu season was SARS-CoV-2 before it could be diagnosed

This is complete BS on par with 5G conspiracies. We know how quickly this virus spreads if left unchecked and someone would have noticed the excessive amount of dead bodies piling up. We also know it spreads very well via air travel, it would have been all over the world not long after it was spreading wildly across Australia. And if we had some sort of immunity already from a bad flu season, then why did it spread so fast when we did have outbreaks? There's absolutely no way this virus was spreading in Australia in mid-2019.

The idea it was in Australia earlier is created by people that don't like the solutions we used so they work backwards to create other explanations, quite often paired with a large dose of American Exceptionalism. Things Australia did that worked: Border closures (intenrally and externally), contact tracing, masks and lockdowns.

decafninja5 tahun yang lalu

The Asian countries that fared relatively well - Taiwan/Japan/Korea/etc.etc. - I guess you could chalk it up to cultural differences, but what and how did Australia, a "Western" country that I reckon is culturally more similar to the USA and Europe than to say, Japan or Korea, do so well and differently vs. the USA? Correct me if wrong, but Aussie culture has an individualistic streak like the USA too, doesn't it?

vmception5 tahun yang lalu

Geography, topology, authoritative control, non-porous border which was closed, mandatory two week quarantine for any exception

rvn10455 tahun yang lalu

+ a small population of 25 million

vmception5 tahun yang lalu

yes thats useful context, I was mentally grouping that into topology kind of stretching that to the few areas where people live and how desolate the rest is

BelenusMordred5 tahun yang lalu

Australia abandoned their own citizens abroad to thundering applause. No other country on Earth did that.

The number of people allowed back into the country is minuscule and right now, foreign business travellers get priority on flights because they can pay more for seats.

shoo5 tahun yang lalu

another factor could be how cohesive / fragmented the government response is -- maybe this is another facet of "authoritative control".

here's a crude model as a straw-man thought experiment:

australia has a federal government with some degree of control but the 8 local state/territory governments still get a reasonable amount of ability to make local decisions. The states often disagree with the federal government, and with each other, and have disagreed about the appropriate responses to covid in many cases.

Suppose the federal government has no ability to control anything. Each local government has a 95% chance of doing something reasonable in response to a pandemic and a 5% chance of doing something stupid. If we make the poor working assumption that each local government decides what to do independently of the others, then about 2/3rds of the time we would expect all 8 australian local governments to do something reasonable, and 1/3 of the time one or more local government will respond to the pandemic in a stupid way. So maybe we got to see the 2/3rds outcome in australia -- or perhaps we actually saw a 1/3rd outcome where stupid decisions were made that dramatically elevated risk, but we simply got lucky.

In contrast the US has say 51 local government regions, so there's about a 7% chance that they all do something reasonable and a 93% chance that at least one local government region does something stupid.

Then if it is hard or impossible to isolate the impacts of bad decisions to each local region, the impact of poor decisions in one region can help outbreaks spread in connected regions.

On another hand, a downside of having a strong central control of the entire country's response is that if that central response is stupid, then the entire country starts cohesively doing something stupid, whereas a country with more fragmented/decentralised decision making might fare a bit better locally.

vmception5 tahun yang lalu

that's a very interesting way of looking at it, but also in the US you would have very many people in a place with reasonable policies implemented that will simply go to a place with unreasonable policies

(assuming reasonable means policies that mitigate and slow down the spread of COVID19, but I'm not saying anybody else reading this has to subscribe to that thought or the idea that COVID19 is worthwhile to slow down)

lend0005 tahun yang lalu

Those places all happen to be islands (South Korea being a political island). Regardless of population and density in the country, if you share land borders, you are subject to the whims of the least careful country on your subcontinent.

ceejayoz5 tahun yang lalu

Vietnam’s doing well despite plenty of border. There’s clearly more than one variable at play.

decafninja5 tahun yang lalu

I'm not too familiar with Vietnamese culture, but I'd probably chalk them up to the "Asian culture" factor which in general tends to be more collectivist than most Western countries.

Isn't Vietnam a highly authoritarian country too?

refurb5 tahun yang lalu

As someone who has lived in developing Asian countries to say there is a more collectivist culture isn’t accurate. Just look at the level of pollution (I’ll dump my trash here because who cares?) and “it’s not illegal if you don’t get caught” attitude.

I would say there is a much greater acceptance of control than in the West. If the govt decides to lock an apartment building up with residents inside to control Covid you won’t here many protests.

lend0005 tahun yang lalu

Of course. But even in Vietnam's case, geography is clearly playing a major role. Policy differences can explain variation within SE Asia, but all of those countries have spikes at the same time, and are in a relative bubble of land travel in the continent (major border with China, which is more or less COVID-free due to authoritarian measures, lowly trafficked mountain ranges and undeveloped regions, and a thin strip connecting to Malaysia).

Seems like the main factors for success are: 1. Geography 2. Density 3. Freedom (or lack thereof) 4. Masks 5. Money

flukus5 tahun yang lalu

> f you share land borders, you are subject to the whims of the least careful country on your subcontinent.

Only if a nation is incapable of controlling their land borders, and that doesn't have to mean fully closed.

All of those countries have had outbreaks and a single case in a country is enough to negate any advantage being an island brings, all have successfully controlled the virus even after it got a beach head.

makomk5 tahun yang lalu

Well, how hard countries were hit early on seems to heavily depend on distance from Italy and the amount of travel from there. There was a very noticeable gradient in Europe with Italy as the epicenter as I recall. (A lot of media coverage talked about Taiwan etc doing well despite lots of travel from China, but that seems to be a bit of a red herring - for whatever reason, almost all countries did pretty well at holding back the initial wave of cases from China, even the USA. Genomic tracing suggests it was Covid spreading from Europe to New York and then to the rest of the country that did the US in. Quite likely from Italy, given the timing of New York Fashion Week.) Then the countries with big initial outbreaks never really managed to recover, though dodging the worst of it initially didn't guarantee future success.

Australia and New Zealand are of course an awful lot closer geographically to Taiwan, Japan and Korea than they are to Europe - and there's a huge variation between all those countries in terms of the other things you might think affect Covid, like willingness to lock down, culture, level of testing, etc..

jjcm5 tahun yang lalu

I’m one of the rare ones who had covid in Australia, but also spent time in the states during the pandemic so I’ve seen both sides, and experienced how a positive case is addressed here in Aus.

Australians care far, far more. I saw more people wearing masks on Sydney trains at zero cases than I did in a US supermarket at the peak. Politics don’t play into whether or not you wear a mask in Australia. In addition, Australian’s have made sacrifices for the greater good of all in the past (giving up guns for example). This just isn’t a thing in America. While both are western countries, there are major differences in mindset.

When I tested positive in Australia, I was immediately moved to my own private apartment dedicated for covid patients, free of charge. I wasn’t allowed to leave, but was fed and had doctors visiting me twice a day for vitals. I had very mild symptoms through all of this, but they treated it very seriously. In America they just send you home. Australia invested more up front to keep the curve low.

Despite having some complications with the duration of my stay, which lead me to be quarantined for 31 days[1], I vastly prefer Australia’s approach to the pandemic.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-15/sydney-man-covid-poli...

decafninja5 tahun yang lalu

I always thought Australian culture had its individualistic streak like American culture. I guess I was wrong, or at least it's a different flavor of individualism.

mrec5 tahun yang lalu

I didn't get the impression that individualism was the USA's problem here, so much as political tribalism. Mask-wearing seemed to get established very early on as a tribal marker, and everything else followed from that.

decafninja5 tahun yang lalu

I guess political tribalism was certainly a big factor, but I always thought it was something that amplified an already existing characteristic for "rugged individualism", as in, a tendency for people not liking being told what they can or can't do.

It exists to various degrees in pretty much any culture (even highly collectivist cultures like some Asian countries), but in the USA, I think it's seen as a bedrock upon which the country was founded on and successful with. I don't disagree, and I think this individualist go-get-em culture contributed to some of the country's successes, but in times like this, it certainly shows its dark side.

You could chalk up the whole US healthcare system fiasco to this too.

donw5 tahun yang lalu

Tribalism was certainly a significant factor, but I would wager that inconsistency played a bigger role:

- Major political figures publicly flaunted their own mask mandates and lockdown rules, with zero consequences.

"The rules are for you, not us" is not how you get people to come together to fight a pandemic.

- Media condemning social gatherings as super-spreader events, while at the same time, endorsing only very specific riots/protests.

- At the start of the pandemic, everybody wanted masks.

The CDC then stated masks were ineffective.

After that, if you tried to get ahold of masks, you were attacked for doing so. I personally witnessed this tens of times. The same people then flipped around and attacked you if you didn't wear a mask.

It was straight out of the last scene in Orwell's 1984. It was spooky.

Later, the CDC came out and said, "Hey, we lied to you to guarantee a supply of masks for medical personnel. But you should totally trust us now!"

- Media in the US was and is literally nothing but fearporn, which has largely bifurcated the population into "living in terror" and "fresh out of fucks to give".

There's plenty more examples, but I'll stop here.

The inconsistency would have been workable if it wasn't for the violence and anger. Your ability to publicly change your mind without sacrificing credibility inversely correlates to the violence of your opinion.

ShroudedNight5 tahun yang lalu

> At the start of the pandemic, everybody wanted masks.

> The same people then flipped around and attacked you if you didn't wear a mask.

I'm of the opinion that the CDC definitely shot itself in the foot w.r.t. the mask issue initially, but I feel it's important to note that the especially belligerent individualists wanted masks when they thought they would protect themselves, but were completely uninterested in their use when they were determined to primarily be effective as a form of source control to protect others.

donw5 tahun yang lalu

Both false and irrelevant.

The most violent people I observed were the ones that flipped from "you don't need a mask, and you're too stupid to wear one anyway: they're complex medical equipment that requires training" to "if you don't wear a mask you're literally killing grandma".

It was amazingly counterproductive.

The goal is to get people to mask up. If they believe doing so will protect them, then good. If they believe doing so will protect others, also good. It does not matter which of these they believe.

ShroudedNight5 tahun yang lalu

What is false and irrelevant?

I'll readily admit that my assertion was based on anecdotal experience, and was probably worded with more objective confidence than warranted, but my experience was that those hostile to the idea that masks were most effective if reserved for front-line medical PPE, were also those hostile to the idea of being obligated to wear a mask for others' sake.

> The goal is to get people to mask up.

Is this a bad thing? Do you believe that there is some ulterior motive in this beyond expected improvements in infection control?

throwawayboise5 tahun yang lalu

100% spot on. Almost exactly how I saw things go where I am, including the flip-flopping on masks/gloves.

richardw5 tahun yang lalu

Perception from SA is that Australians are fairly strict rule followers. Personally I’d like more of that, but some friends didn’t like it at all.

Doggy bags discouraged: https://www.foodsafety.com.au/blog/are-restaurant-doggy-bags... (That would astound most SA’ns)

First mandatory cycling helmets: https://www.mondaq.com/australia/crime/899922/are-cyclists-i...

kbenson5 tahun yang lalu

Yeah, not allowing leftovers for meals bought to be taken with you would not go over well in the U.S. either, for multiple reasons.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

makomk5 tahun yang lalu

I think it's a lot easier to get people to go along with measures like this when they actually seem to work, which might make it hard to disentangle cause and effect. Certainly, Europe seemed to have a hell of a drop in lockdown compliance once it became clear they weren't going to eradicate Covid or go away any time in the foreseeable future. Also, the media reporting focuses on the success stories and the people who comply when things are going well and the opposite when it's not working - Australia and New Zealand had their fair share of quarantine hotel escapes and government screw-ups in their precautions, some of which they got more lucky with than others, but because it was a success those didn't make it into news coverage elsewhere so much.

wyattpeak5 tahun yang lalu

I don't think we are particularly individualistic, at least in the cities. Moreso as you head out into the bush, but that's true everywhere.

I suspect it's a hangover from our earlier days, which were recent enough they still live on in popular culture. Also it's not an image we've exactly tried to suppress, since outside of an event like covid it's generally seen as a positive thing.

dominotw5 tahun yang lalu

> than I did in a US supermarket at the peak.

Where was this though? I am in chicago and even now I've never seen anyone in a grocery store without a mask. All the store require people to wear masks and have mask policies.

which supermarket was this ?

> . In America they just send you home.

https://www.health.qld.gov.au/news-events/news/what-happens-...

> If your symptoms are manageable without medical supervision, your doctor will instruct you to look after yourself at home in isolation.

https://www.coronavirus.vic.gov.au/what-do-if-you-have-coron...

> I have received a positive test result for coronavirus (COVID-19). What should I do?

> If you test positive for coronavirus (COVID-19) you must immediately go home and isolate

Why were you put up in an apartment if you only had 'very mild symptoms' when they advice everyone else to isolate at home?

perardi5 tahun yang lalu

Also in Chicago here.

I, too, have seen 100% mask compliance in grocery stores.

And when I was downstate for a non-COVID family medical emergency during the December peak, I saw 100% compliance…in the grocery store. The gym? Ha. Nary a mask in sight. They actually scoffed at me when I asked when I went in for a day pass. And this is a franchise of a national gym.

And from friends’ experiences, you had to go all as far as Indiana to experience maskless in Meijer.

[deleted]5 tahun yang lalu

felipemnoa5 tahun yang lalu

I would guess that he was not in a city.

dominotw5 tahun yang lalu

which supermarket doesn't have mask policy. Some store in middle of nowhere represents "US supermarket" ? .

kbenson5 tahun yang lalu

"Supermarket" doesn't mean large chain store, it just means large store containing both food and household items. Plenty of locales have local supermarkets, either as singular stores or small regional chains. Whole Foods started this way. It was six years after the first store that they first expanded outside Austin, and their growth was fueled by buying lots of these small chains.[1]

I would say it's not only possible, but likely that some of these chains used a pro/con mask stance to distinguish themselves in certain regions of the U.S.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Foods_Market#History

Rebelgecko5 tahun yang lalu

Everywhere I go had a mask policy posted but that doesn't mean it's actually enforced. If I had a dollar for every person I saw "wearing" a mask that wasn't actually covering their mouth and nose, I'd have retired last year

colpabar5 tahun yang lalu

>free of charge

As an American it is absolutely astounding to hear about things like this. My girlfriend fell off her bike last year and needed stitches and before we let the doctors at the hospital do anything, we were on the phone with her insurance agency to try and figure out the cheapest way to get them. Of course we had no idea what it would cost in the end, so we had to worry for the next few weeks until we got the bill.

stevenjohns5 tahun yang lalu

Most of what you're saying is misleading at best.

> I saw more people wearing masks on Sydney trains at zero cases than I did in a US supermarket at the peak

That's because NSW had legislated the wearing of masks on trains until a couple of weeks ago. It wasn't voluntary, it was either wear a mask or get fined. And since the mask mandate was taken off -- surprise, surprise -- the overwhelming majority stopped wearing them on trains.

> Australian’s have made sacrifices for the greater good of all in the past (giving up guns for example)

"Giving up guns" never happened, what did happen was the forceful buyback of self-loading weapons from law abiding people who followed the law and turned them in. The people who didn't follow the law -- that is, the people who are actually responsible for the violent crime in the first place -- kept their guns and that's why self-loading firearms continue to be seized today from drug dealers and gangsters.

For some general statistics:

1. The number of homicides (and all violent crime) went up after the 1996 firearms buyback[0] and didn't go down until the police took actual action against crime in 2001

2. We have more firearms in 2021 than we did in 1996[1] and, surprising only some, less crime

The major difference in the Australian mindstate is how both major parties are centre-left so it's rare for major issues to be politicised, instead we just have politicians supporting the same things and bickering over otherwise trivial implementation details.

[0] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AUS/australia/murder-h...

[1] https://www.smh.com.au/national/more-guns-in-australia-now-t...

bengale5 tahun yang lalu

I tend to find the overuse of the word hero bothers me, but I don’t know what other word would describe people like this.

pmiller25 tahun yang lalu

This would be a correct usage, not a performative usage like corporations calling grocery store workers "heroes" because they have to go to work or lose jobs they depend on.

eertami5 tahun yang lalu

You and I also depend on grocery store workers. We would be in even greater chaos without them. I'm not sure where you're going with this.

kbenson5 tahun yang lalu

It's possible for someone to do good and help others without rising to the level of a hero. At least it was prior to the expansion of the word to cover far more than it originally did.

We've gone from using the word to describe people who have taken a concrete action that makes them deserving of that description to using it to describe anyone that does a job that some people sometimes end up being heroes while doing them.

Do I think most grocery store workers are heroes? No. I think it's possible to be one, but many essential elements are missing. Is that store in danger of closing because they don't have enough people to run it, and it's the only real method for people in the area to feasibly feed themselves, and while that worker really doesn't want to expose themselves, they see it as their duty to make sure the store stays open so the people around them have a way to feed themselves? That's a hero.

If it's something you would do to help others at danger to yourself when presented to you even if money was taken out of the equation? You might be a hero. I think a great many police officers and firefighters would intervene in a situation they knew they could help in even if it was dangerous, and they were off duty. I don't think that makes every police officer or firefighter a hero.

I am grateful for the people that continues to do their jobs even when it became more risky. I'll acknowledge that and I agree they helped us all, and I appreciate that and them. I don't think that makes them heroes.

The Doctor in the article might feel somewhat offended if what she went through were deemed similar to what a grocery store worker went through. If I was a grocery store worker, I would feel ashamed and embarrassed if someone tried to equate what I went through to something like what medical staff in an ICU go through. Yet, when we use the same word to describe the achievements and sacrifices of them both, and it's the highest praise we have for that, how are we not doing exactly that to some degree?

h4waii5 tahun yang lalu

I believe they are essentially saying this:

https://i.redd.it/pmori9td3ar51.jpg

I hate just drive-by posting an image of a tweet from Reddit, which may not even be true, but I think it's succinct.

pmiller25 tahun yang lalu

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pmiller25 tahun yang lalu

Do you think someone is a hero because they have to choose to protect either their job or their health? Either way is a huge lose.

munificent5 tahun yang lalu

I do think it's fair to characterize someone as a "hero" if they take great or sacrifice in ways that benefit others, even if the person doesn't have complete liberty and agency at the moment that they do it. There are always forces and restrictions that affect our choices.

pmiller25 tahun yang lalu

Well, then we disagree. Making one of two bad choices doesn't make anyone a hero in my book. I don't believe most of the grocery store workers who continued to go to work amidst the danger of the pandemic without any idea that there would be enhanced unemployment benefits were at all "heroic." It's as another comment here put it: take money out of the equation, and I'm sure we would have seen a vastly different result.

If the choice is to become homeless, along with all the difficulties that presents; versus maybe die of a nasty disease at some indefinite future point, I think the majority would choose the latter. That's just pragmatism, not heroism.

munificent5 tahun yang lalu

Sure, that's a logically coherent framework you can choose to believe.

Personally, I like to interpret people's actions in a framework of maximum charity and compassion. Their work benefits others at risk to themselves, so why not take the opportunity to give them credit for that?

You can do that while simultaneously criticizing the financial systems that make doing that work a less than perfectly free choice.

libraryatnight5 tahun yang lalu

That people believe police and military are by default "heroes" is a huge problem in the US. I think in this case, we're reading about an actual hero. I don't cringe reading that word in this case.

calltrak5 tahun yang lalu

throwawayboise5 tahun yang lalu

Doctors always see people at their sickest and most fragile. I'm not sure I could do it, but it's what they sign up for.

GavinMcG5 tahun yang lalu

What are you trying to say? "It's what they signed up for" sounds like it's hinting at a further claim, but it's not clear what it is.

throwawayboise5 tahun yang lalu

Doctors that I know don't get personally invested. They know what they can do, and they do the best they can for any patient. When you're a trauma surgeon in Detroit, you treat gunshot wounds every day. You can't save them all, and you don't take that home with you or as a personal failing or you will not stay sane.

GavinMcG5 tahun yang lalu

The whole point of the article is that many doctors have had to step into roles or acuity levels that were not every day material for them and not what they signed up for.

A trauma surgeon expecting gunshot wounds could well find it much more challenging to be working as an ICU physician, where you can't detach yourself as easily, and where you can't use your most-practiced skills, and where you can't know by the end of the procedure whether the patient's odds are good. They specifically didn't sign up for that.

It's easy to say "don't get personally invested" but even if you're not getting attached to particular patients, it's demoralizing to go from an environment where you see a range of outcomes (including some bad ones) to one where you're constantly surrounded by patients near death with little chance for improvement and where your skills don't necessarily seem to matter. That's not about being invested.