World Health Organization

Nurses COVID

Published

What are the strengths and deficits of this organization? I've heard pros and cons lately. I do think, if there are problems, the time to address them is AFTER this crisis.

I'd love to learn information from fellow nurses.

On 4/17/2020 at 5:50 PM, Daisy4RN said:

This time line shows that the Trump admin was acting in those months you claim they were not all the while getting zero help from the Democrats in Ja

And you're supporting this "argument" with quotes that have nothing to do with COVID, campaign trail dates, random quotes from Dr. Gupta., etc.

Got it.

In reality, is the responsibility of the PRESIDENT to coordinate the national response to protect the citizenry from a pandemic - which is precisely why the CDC, NIC, Health and Human Services, Armed Forces, etc etc are appointed by and report to the PRESIDENT.

Not to Speaker Pelosi and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, not to television Doctors, not to Bernie Sanders on the campaign trail.

Get it?

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On 4/20/2020 at 2:17 AM, happygal56 said:

The political divide is certainly apparent on this thread. ?

I'm sure it is and I am aware at how polarized the nation is.

But when we find ourselves in the mere second inning of a nine inning pandemic virus, of which there is no established treatment for ,nor vaccine nor none on the imminent horizon, is one which happens to be literally killing our peers and families by the tens of thousands and climbing higher and higher all the time....

and which, by the way, has us staring into the abyss of a depression that our grandchildren will still be contending with....

I'm not just not amused anymore.

I'm certainly not interested in protecting the delicate sensibilities of the partisans who just want to stand by their man and deny what happened to get us here, deflect blame and all the usual same old.

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6 hours ago, DannyBoy8 said:

Ebola, SARs, and swine flu are all limited by attributes of the virus, to include: mode and lack of ease of transmission (ebola), shorter incubation period (all 3), and a predominantly symptomatic contagious period (again, all 3). COVID has a long incubation period during which time the host is contagious and spreads the virus with relative ease.>>

The WHO considers contact tracing to be essential in the containment of Ebola, whereas it is a futile effort with COVID. From a purely epidemiological standpoint, we would still be exactly where we are with Clinton as president. We'd likely have more vents, PPE, and social welfare benefits; but, we'd still have the virus, social distancing, and a stand-still economy.

Furthermore, the consensus by most in the global health community was that the Obama admin did a poor job of responding to Ebola and was well behind the curve. The US Gov't was lobbied for months during the Spring and Summer of 2014 by international entities who requested assistance as cases continued to rise exponentially. Strong criticism was directed at his inaction by MSF/Doctors Without Borders - an organization with a sterling reputation as a beacon of impartiality and apolitical opinion. It wasn't until October/November of 2014 that President Obama appointed his Ebola Czar and sought funding to fight Ebola. Obama sent the USPHS to Liberia very late in the game.....as in they treated 42 patients....out of 10,675.

I think you know this, but COVID19 actually is SARS 2 (the disease name vs. the virus). I'm not aware of any remarkably different incubation period however the physiology of SARS2 seems more evolved to be easier to wreak havoc.

I'm not sure how Obama did a "poor job" of containing Ebola. There were 11 cases in the US, 9 of which originated outside of the USA (confirmable on Wiki and other sources). A President's responsibility is to support a state of the art national biosurveillance team, to actually listen to them and respond. They can't prevent outbreaks in Liberia or China.

Incidentally he performed remarkably well preventing an equally disasterous zoonotic swine flu which originated within our own borders.

Both had the potential to be what we'e looking at now but thanks to a competent Federal Government that was actually interested in governing, they weren't.

He also left Donald Trump with a world class pandemic response team led by one of the smartest epidemiologists there is, and which Trump typically and predictably dismantled.

Notably I agree with many of your points, but not that this was unavoidable. Testing and Tracing should have and certainly could have been implemented months earlier.South Korea was able to do it. Malyasia was able to do it. China was able to do it, etc etc.

Yet somehow 3.75 months into this we can't even get PPE made and distributed , functional tests made available nor the soap and cleaning products citizens need to protect themselves available.

Anyway, thanks for an interesting and substantive perspective.

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2 hours ago, HeartlandRN said:

I think you know this, but COVID19 actually is SARS 2 (the disease name vs. the virus). I'm not aware of any remarkably different incubation period however the physiology of SARS2 seems more evolved to be easier to wreak havoc.

I'm not sure how Obama did a "poor job" of containing Ebola. There were 11 cases in the US, 9 of which originated outside of the USA (confirmable on Wiki and other sources). A President's responsibility is to support a state of the art national biosurveillance team, to actually listen to them and respond. They can't prevent outbreaks in Liberia or China.

Incidentally he performed remarkably well preventing an equally disasterous zoonotic swine flu which originated within our own borders.

Both had the potential to be what we'e looking at now but thanks to a competent Federal Government that was actually interested in governing, they weren't.

He also left Donald Trump with a world class pandemic response team led by one of the smartest epidemiologists there is, and which Trump typically and predictably dismantled.

COVID-19 is remarkably different than SARs. The incubation period is longer, we have asymptomatic spread, we are sicker for longer, and it is communicated more easily. Just because SARs and COVID come from the same family of viruses does not mean they are comparable, I.e. Ebola vs Marburg, HIV vs HTLV. SARs was a virus that killed its host relatively quickly, which is a bad "strategy" for its own longevity. COVID has basically a perfectly planned terrorist attack. It sets off a bomb in a patient, and then waits for people to come help over the course of a 3 week hospitalization (RNs, MDs, etc.), and then sets off secondary bombs in each of those victims once infected - rinse and repeat.

The fact of the matter is that a modern health care system is setup to contain Ebola. We easily identify those are are infected and contagious as they are symptomatic and then we protect ourselves from contact with bodily fluids.

Unfortunately, countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone don't have such a strong infrastructure. Obama had nothing to do with containing the spread; just like the presidents of France, Spain, Germany, UK, Switzerland, Italy, and Norway had nothing to do with containing an outbreak in their respective lands. It had everything to do with a functioning healthcare system that has been matured over the last century - not the case in the West African nations that suffered through the Ebola 2014 outbreak.

Don't take my word for it though.

"Schleiss said the SARS virus didn’t have the “fitness to persist in the human population,” which eventually led to its demise.

Schleiss added this doesn’t seem to be the case with COVID-19, which seems to be able to spread and thrive in the human body.

Overall, though SARS’ death rate was higher, COVID-19 has led to “more fatalities, more economic repercussions, more social repercussions than we [had] with SARS,” Johnson said."

Dr. Schleiss is an infectious disease expert at UofMinn

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