Physicians on the front lines of CoVid 19 defence are getting sick. The American College of Emergency Physicians reports two ER doctors are in critical condition after contracting the disease, one in his 40s in Washington State, the other a 70-year-old doctor in New Jersey.
Which brings us to something nobody seems to be talking about, nobody, that is, except the inestimable Jennifer Christian, about whom I wrote last week. In today’s Work Fitness and Disability Roundtable, Jennifer asks about the consequences to elderly doctors and nurses when the federal government and all the states tell the elderly to stay home. What are the implications?
From today’s Roundtable:
The 2018 Census of Licensed Physicians in the US ( https://www.fsmb.org/
siteassets/advocacy/ publications/2018census.pdf ) by the Federal of State Medical Boards found 985,026 physicians now licensed to practice medicine the US (which doesn’t necessarily mean they are in active practice), with 30.3% of them 60+ years old in 2018, compared to 25.2% in 2010. If we use the 2019 State Physician Workforce Data Report ( https://store.aamc.org/2019- state-physician-workforce- data-report.html ) from the Amer Assoc of Medical Colleges which identifies physicians in ACTIVE PRACTICE based on the 2018 AMA Physician Masterfile, there are currently 908,760 physicians in active practice, and of those 32.1% are at least 60 years of age. Sending them all home means benching 291,711 doctors.
Alright, let’s all agree we’re not going to tell nearly 300,000 physicians to stay home during the worst healthcare crisis of the last century. So, how do we protect them?
The first line of defence for ER physicians and nurses is personal protective equipment (PPE). That means appropriate face masks, gowns, gloves, soap and the like. Trouble is, the U.S. doesn’t have nearly enough PPE to go around if our coming experience resembles that of Italy or Wuhan. Think about that for a minute.
The only way to reduce the coming harm to elderly clinicians is to reduce the cases – flatten the curve. This presents each one of us with a choice. Either we do everything possible to avoid the disease – social distancing, staying home, washing hands, etc. – or, we engage in communal irresponsibility by treating all the warnings as mere suggestions, sort of the way we treat highway speed limits.
That type of behavior was very much in evidence over the weekend, from St. Patrick’s Day get togethers all over the country to Bourbon Street parties in New Orleans. Then, of course, there was the horrendoma at O’Hare and twelve other airports yesterday, as thousands of people tried to get back to the USA from overseas and had to stand for hours elbow to elbow waiting to get screened for a virus many of them were probably spreading during the communal scrum. Will somebody please tell me why our federal government continues to do things that have all the competence and well-thoughtoutedness of a Keystone Cops car chase?
All clinicians, expecially the heroic elderly ones now on the front lines, deserve our full-throttled disease avoidance engagement. Otherwise, we’re going to wake up a couple of weeks from now only to discover, as the bodies pile up, that what we did was way too little, way too late.
Have a nice day.
Tags: health policy
