COVID has caused many problems around the world, and there is a hope that come 2021, the pandemic will disappear and life can resume “as normal.” While there are many trends that point to fundamental changes- from everything in the economy itself to just life in general -that suggest things are not going to just “go back to the same”, it seems to be too early to assume that things will get better. According to a report made by The Atlantic, the COVID pandemic is just preparing to enter it’s second wave, and it threatens to overwhelm hospitals, medical suppliers, and ultimately, cause potentially more deaths than from the first wave.
In the past two weeks, the hospital had to convert an entire building into a COVID-19 tower, from the top down. It now has 10 COVID-19 units, each taking up an entire hospital floor. Three of the units provide intensive care to the very sickest people, several of whom die every day. One unit solely provides “comfort care” to COVID-19 patients who are certain to die. “We’ve never had to do anything like this,” Angela Hewlett, the infectious-disease specialist who directs the hospital’s COVID-19 team, told me. “We are on an absolutely catastrophic path.”
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Cawcutt knows what’s coming. Throughout the pandemic, hospitalizations have lagged behind cases by about 12 days. Over the past 12 days, the total number of confirmed cases in Nebraska has risen from 82,400 to 109,280. That rise represents a wave of patients that will slam into already beleaguered hospitals between now and Thanksgiving. “I don’t see how we avoid becoming overwhelmed,” says Dan Johnson, a critical-care doctor. People need to know that “the assumption we will always have a hospital bed for them is a false one.”
What makes this “nightmare” worse, he adds, “is that it was preventable.” The coronavirus is not unstoppable, as some have suggested and as New Zealand, Iceland, Australia, and Hong Kong have resoundingly disproved—twice. Instead, the Trump administration never mounted a serious effort to stop it. Whether through gross incompetence or deliberate strategy, the president and his advisers left the virus to run amok, allowed Americans to get sick, and punted the consequences to the health-care system. And they did so repeatedly, even after the ordeal of the spring, after the playbook for controlling the virus became clear, and despite months of warnings about a fall surge.
Not even the best-prepared hospital can compensate for an unchecked pandemic. UNMC’s preparations didn’t fail so much as the U.S. created a situation in which hospitals could not possibly succeed. “We can prepare over and over for a wave of patients,” says Cawcutt, “but we can’t prepare for a tsunami.” (source)
Will this happen? Will there be a suitable ‘vaccine’ for this illness? That is to be determined in the future. What it is safe to say, it seems, is that the trends from COVID that include but by all means are not limited to:
-Supply line disruptions
-Panic buying
-Mask-wearing in public
-Social ostracism from one’s neighbor
-The growing general distrust of people in public
are all things that one should expect to grow for the near future. Likewise, as we at Shoebat.com have continually mentioned, there are also the trends of economic destabilization that are leading to impoverishment, further debt accumulation, and eventually, political chaos that could translate into militarism.
There is no happy ending to his picture. It all leads to something bad, for even if COVID does clear up, the problems exposed by the virus will not go away, but just fester. Adding more waves of COVID will only cause the current trends to accelerate.
Either way, since the general end trajectory is known, it makes it easier to see what the future holds, for while the specifics are not known, we can say that the US is entering a “political” and “economic winter” of sorts, and that those who can see this can take the proper steps to prepare for what is ahead.