A Text From A Pulmonary and Critical Care Doctor: It Is Not The Flu

I happened upon a tweet by June Diane Raphael (left). According to Wikipedia she:  “is an American actress, comedian, and screenwriter . . .  born and raised in Rockville Centre, New York,  to Diane and John Raphael, where she graduated from South Side High School in 1998. She is of Irish descent, and was raised Catholic . . . attended New York University (NYU), where she studied acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.” She graduated from NYU in 2002.  She is married, the mother of two children with a successful career.

I thought setting out her background would give credence to what I am about to write. She tweeted:

“This is the text I just received after asking my best friend ( pulmonary and critical care doctor) how she was doing.  Here is what her friend replied:

“Tomorrow will be my 10^th day working straight. We are completely surging. I am carrying more and sicker patients than ever in my career. They are almost all covid. I expect at least half of them to die but probably not for an average of 1-3 weeks (which they will spend alone in the hospital.) I have to call their families and update them daily. I sobbed on the phone with one mom who I have to update about her daughter who will likely die. We are overflowing our units. We are short staffed. We are physically, emotionally and mentally exhausted. People here aren’t wearing masks, they are having Sunday family dinners, going to church, planning for Thanksgiving . Thee is such a disconnect between the hospital and the surrounding communities. I don’t leave the hospital to bells,  whistles and clanging pots and pans . . . I drive home stunned through a college town with lines out the doors for local bars. People complain about their personal freedom being limited and the mental effects of social distancing and wearing mask . . . but give no respect to others right to live and give no thoughts to the mental effects of accidentally and killing grandma or the trauma they are imposing on their health care workers. This is devastating.“

Then I recall receiving a comment telling me that I should listen to Dr. Joseph Mercola who writes the following:  “After six months of intermittent or in some cases near-continuous lockdowns, many have reached their limit and uprisings are finally emerging around the world. The last week of August 2020 saw gatherings of tens of thousands of individuals in Berlin,¹ London² and Dublin,³ protesting stay-at-home orders, business closures, mask and vaccine mandates . . .  These are just a few of the many demonstrations that have taken place in recent weeks around the world, as people are starting to realize their human rights are being stripped away over a virus with a lethality on par with that of seasonal influenza and other pandemic viruses, none of which was responded to with a global shutdown of economies and forced quarantining of healthy individuals.”

He ends his article writing: “Sooner or later everyone must decide which is more important: Personal liberty or false security? Circling back to where I started, the good news is that many are in fact starting to see the writing on the wall; they’re starting to see we’ve been “had,” and are starting to choose liberty over brutal totalitarianism in the name of public health.”

Trump did mention the flu also. He noted the yearly figures: “last year we had approximately 36,000 deaths due to what’s called the flu. . . . when I was hearing the amount of people that died with flu, I was shocked to hear it.  Anywhere from 27,000 to 70,000 or 77,000.  And I guess they said, in 1990, that was in particular very bad; it was higher than that.”

Did you ever hear of doctors complaining about being worked to total exhaustion or hospitals running out of beds during the flu? Did you ever hear of people dying alone from the flu?

On the beginning days of March there were 11 deaths from coronavirus. Less than nine months later there are almost 250,000. Some predict by the end of February there will be 400,000.  Does it have as Dr. Mercola said “a lethality on par with that of seasonal influenza?”   Or has his falsehoods and Trump’s ignorance and indifference brought unnecessary deaths to Americans?