Combating COVID in the ER
Prognosis: Misconception
Bloomberg
4.1 • 838 Ratings
🗓️ 15 February 2021
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Doctors and nurses can feel as if they’re living in two worlds. One in which patients are getting sick and dying from the coronavirus, and another in which people deny the virus is real. Emergency room physician Mike Hunihan describes what it’s like to live and work with that dissonance. Today's special episode is a collaboration with Tradeoffs, a podcast about our costly, complicated and counter-intuitive health care system.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What could you do if your data was working for you and not against you? With Bloomberg delivering |
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| 0:31.2 | Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day 338 since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. |
| 0:41.3 | Today, we're bringing you a special edition of the podcast from our friends at tradeoffs. |
| 0:47.4 | During the first week of February, hospitalizations for COVID-19 in the U.S. |
| 0:53.1 | fell below 110,000 for the first time since December 13th. |
| 1:00.0 | The pace of vaccinations is also quickly ramping up. It's good news for sure. But for frontline health care providers, relief is still a long way off. And many of them are coming up on a full |
| 1:14.7 | year of combating COVID. Today, what one doctor has learned in that year about death, denial, |
| 1:23.8 | and this new disease. Host of tradeoffsoffs, Dan Gorinstein, has more. |
| 1:33.1 | It was kind of like when the tornado sirens go off around here. |
| 1:37.8 | Mike Hunahan is a 37-year-old emergency room physician in Tulsa, Oklahoma. |
| 1:42.9 | Mike remembers when COVID first appeared in the U.S. |
| 1:45.9 | He was almost sure it was going to spread fast. Like the sky is black and the birds are quiet. |
| 1:52.8 | It's very spooky and there's just this, the loudest siren you've ever heard and you just kind of |
| 1:58.5 | brace. He was bracing for a wave of sickness and death and he was bracing against his own fear that |
| 2:06.3 | people would fail to meet this moment. |
| 2:08.6 | I was worried at the beginning of the pandemic that we would know exactly what to do, you |
| 2:14.0 | know, wear masks in distance and not go to gatherings and stuff, but not have the courage |
| 2:20.8 | to do it. One of his first patients did have that courage. She was a woman in her 90s. And I told her |
| 2:27.6 | that she had COVID, and she said, I don't want a ventilator. |
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