One of the reasons that it is so
devastating, the COVID cases
are rising so rapidly, and
hospitalizations are rising so
rapidly is that our public health,
system, the actual people who
make up it have had
a devastating year and a half.
Many of them at or
past the breaking point.
And so when you see things like,
if we can put up the photo again,
the fact that nurses and doctors
are going to be treating COVID
patients in garages again, it's not
that surprising to find out that
some of them are just ready to
be done with this whole thing.
And so I want to show you a bit of
an interview I saw with a nurse in
Mississippi about their experience.
So let's go to that.
>> Wearing our masks and
doing what we need to do.
We're tired, nurses are so tired.
It's getting to a point where we
need help.
We've been helping as
much as we can and
we need help from, our community.
I respect everybody's choices to
get vaccinated or not, but when it
comes down to it, it's going to
just continue to get worse.
And it's going to get to a point
where it affects our kids.
We're that's my biggest fear.
People aren't doing what they need
to do to protect us.
And, we're human, we're not robots,
we're not machines.
We can't continue to do
this forever at this capacity.
>> You're nurse on the ICU floor
right now, but
you're not going to be anymore.
No, I can't do this anymore, I've
seen more death than I ever thought
I would see in my entire life.
It's just heartbreaking and
every way,
I don't know how to describe it,
It's overwhelming.
>> So that is a nurse who has been
dealing with this every day,
who went to the field knowing that
she was going to see a lot of
death, a lot of suffering.
I mean, she works in an ICU.
It's sort of expected, and she has
been broken by this experience,
at least in terms of the ability to
continue doing it on a daily basis.
And we can just sort of hope that
she's an outlier, that no,
there will always be doctors,
there will always be nurses.
But we're finding out in a lot of
places already that that is
not the case.
Texas, I don't know if you saw this
Ben, Texas is having to import
doctors from other states.
Because they can't actually treat
all of the patients that they have.
Now that may be sustainable for
a little bit, that we can just take
doctors from one state sent them
to Texas, but what about when those
states need their doctors?
Think about the dominoes as they
fall when it comes to that.
So what did you think about that
video?
>> Yeah, seriously, this is where
it all comes to planning, right?
This is where it all
comes to planning.
Six months into this pandemic,
we basically knew and honestly,
anybody who really knew what they
were talking about, anybody that's
an epidemiologist that studied
Coronavirus, even a little bit.
Knew that basically after six
months, it's pretty much guaranteed
that coronavirus is going to mutate
to the point where we're
always racing against coronavirus.
And even if we rolled out
a vaccine,
it still wouldn't have done enough.
And we're dealing with it
right now,
with vaccine resistant strains.
It's going to become cyclical,
like the flu, not necessarily
seasonal with a regular cycle, but
it's going to mutate, so that we're
always struggling against it.
What should have happened?
The response should have been
rapidly training people to augment
nurses and medical staff, right?
Maybe that means pulling people out
of active duty or
the National Guard, training them
how to do intubation and
basic treatment for COVID patients.
Maybe it means doing rapid training
programs for
people doing Associate's degrees,
or entry-level like nursing degrees
and stuff like that.
Just ramming people through those
programs, so they can help
augment people in hospitals.
That is what should have been done.
None of that has really been
done and
we're just working people to death.
We're working people to death
literally, as even nurses and
doctors are killing
over from Corona virus,
because they're dealing with Corona
virus patients every day.
>> Exactly.
Yeah, well, that would have been
a great idea, add that to
the long list of things that we
could have and should have done in
that first year that we didn't.
Because we had just not the best
leadership but we had a complete
lack of leadership during
the greatest time of
domestic crisis in our lives here.
I don't know if something like what
you just laid out is being done
under Biden,
I hope that it is because this
isn't going away anytime soon.
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