Stop Hurting Our Healers

Hey guys, it’s Doctor Z. It’s March 19th although I think this update about Covid will hold true for quite some time and bear some rewatching. All right, here’s the thing. Right now we are entering the storm. So we’re seeing an upswing in cases, we’re gonna start seeing some exponential growth around the US and our hospitals are already getting strained. So here are a couple of things I wanna tell you right now. I am getting reports from around the country of frontline healthcare practitioners being harassed in public, stories about dentists refusing to see nurses because their staff is saying, “We know what you do for a living.” Nurses in public being sprayed with Lysol while they’re at the gas station pumping gas.

General stigmatization of healthcare providers by the public, okay. If you want a sure-fire, karmic way to die during this outbreak, abuse the people that are heroically working to keep you safe despite your own dumb assery, okay. There are idiots going out on the beach congregating on mass in Florida. There are older people refusing to obey the quarantine and place things going out and seeing friends and stuff like that. And then you have the audacity to attack and stigmatize the very heroic men and women who are basically putting their lives at risk to take care of you. Are you idiotic, America? What is wrong with you? Okay, we already dropped the ball on early testing, we let containment get out of hand.

Our leadership is absolutely incompetent at the government level to make this happen. So we already screwed that up. Now’s our chance to do the best we can and the public wants to screw it up. I almost feel like this is like some kind of judgment on us, you guys, seriously, behave yourselves. Treat the healthcare professionals with the respect and the honor that they deserve because I am telling you the next part of this talk is that every story I hear from frontline healthcare professionals, whether it’s nurses, respiratory therapists, administrators, or doctors around the country is that they do not have enough masks, they do not have enough training. They do not have enough ventilators, they do not have enough leadership or support from either government or their local administration. And patients are swarming in whether it’s worried, well, they’re not listening just to basically saying, hey, call first. Don’t just show up in the ER with your sniffles.

And now they’re gearing up for what’s gonna be a category five hurricane where we’re gonna be, they are talking in ethics committees here in the Bay Area about what is the ethical way to ration ventilators, you guys. And you’re gonna spray Lysol on a nurse who’s pumping gas. What is wrong with you? And by the way, I’m looking at you leaders, you had time. For the cost of running an ICU for a day, you could have stockpiled N95 masks over the years, you could have prepared for this. And where’s that fancy MBA and all the money we pay you and that fancy bonus and you know, I get messages from administrators, now why are you ragging on hospital leadership man? We’ve been working 24-7 around the clock.

Yeah, what were you doing the whole time before this? To prepare for this? We saw this coming, we’ve been talking about this actually for years. And you can keep passing the buck oh, it’s CDC or it’s FDA. No, ultimately, the buck stops at the local level. All right, and we need to get our stuff together now, because the storm isn’t just coming, it’s actually here. All right, there are Facebook groups of critical care docs who are pooling resources to kind of figure out what’s the best practices. I’m gonna link them in the description on my website to this. I want you to join if you’re a doctor, okay. Because that’s where we can get our learn on. If you’re a member of the public, if you’re a patient, first of all calm down, call ahead to the triage nurse if you have a primary care doc or somebody that you work with already, before you show up in the emergency department. If your local government is telling you to stay inside and stop screwing around, listen, all right?

Listen, and the reason is that if we don’t do this now, all right, we are gonna over welcome our hospitals. We’re gonna overwhelm it. So when little Timmy, all right, falls and breaks his arm, there’s gonna be no doctors to see him. And listen to me hospital people, local governments, et cetera, if you don’t provide our frontline health care professionals with support, with proper sick leave, within N95 and other masks support and PPE, personal protective equipment, okay, you’re complicit in this because it’s one thing, like equipment is one thing but if it’s single doctor or nurse gets sick and they’re out for 14 days, or they get really ill or die, you are talking about huge disruptions, okay.

It’s the smallest investment to keep them safe and you haven’t done it. And people will say, oh, yeah, you know Z, no, no, no, we’ve been working around the clock and this and that, and why are you so hard on us? Because that’s not what’s happening on the front lines. I have administrators reaching out to me, we’d like to come on your show and say how we’re keeping our hospitals open from the administrative side and how it’s so important to have good leadership. And I’m like, you are the most tone deaf piece of crap I’ve ever heard in my life, because everyone on the front lines is bravely going into work, but they don’t have the support. They don’t have the support, all right.

So to the leaders who are doing it right and they exist out there, you are a model. You are leading, all right, keep doing that. To the public, treat your healthcare professionals with respect, because believe me, karma is a bitch. I’m telling you that now. And the third thing, if you’re a frontline healthcare professional, okay, join these Facebook groups that I’m gonna lead you to in the links and understand that we are in this together, that we will get through this, that it’s going to be hard, but that you are doing work that no one else is doing, that you’re running to danger when everyone else is running away. When your dentist is afraid to see you because you’re a nurse. Are you kidding me?

All right, guys, I’m sorry, I get a little frickin’ angry. Please do me a favor, share this video. Leave a comment, tell me your stories. Tell us your stories of what’s going on on the front lines. All right, share them with us because we need, the world needs to know what’s going on and that we have a chance now to go in one of two directions and if we go in the wrong direction, it’s gonna be a long, dark year, all right. Sorry to be alarmist. You guys know generally I’m not, but what I’m hearing is not making me happy. All right, guys, I love you. Thank you to the Supporter Tribe on both YouTube and Facebook and Patreon for making these videos possible and we out. Peace.