You're listening to a bonus episode of the Daily Article podcast, presented by the Denison

Forum and featuring Dr. Jim Denison.

We're familiar with PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now doctors are dealing with pre-TSD, pre-traumatic stress disorder.

A physician in the San Francisco Bay Area published today a sobering article for

the Washington Post about her health care colleagues, it's so urgent that I wanted to quote

from it at length today. Dr. Allison Block wrote these words.

Trauma is defined as a deeply disturbing experience, with post-traumatic stress disorder.

After suffering a trauma, a person experiences intrusive negative thoughts and psychological distress.

Doctors and nurses see news from our colleagues in China, South Korea, and Italy,

letting us know in no uncertain terms what is coming.

The result is that we're all feeling the psychological ramifications of the trauma,

we just haven't experienced the trauma yet. She continues. We're expecting systems overwhelmed

with sick patients who will line the hallways of our emergency rooms and hospital wards. We know

doctors and nurses will get sick and have to self-quarantine for 14 days, leaving the

healthcare workforce decimated. Physicians unknowingly exposed to the coronavirus will spread

the disease to our most vulnerable populations. We'll run out of beds and ventilators and intensive

care units, and we will have to make harrowing, traumatic decisions about who lives and who

dies based on nothing more than utilitarian guesses about

remaining life years.

This part of our article was especially sobering.

We know that we will get infected and we hope that we will be fine after 14 days of quarantine,

...