Dr. Robin’s Covid-19 Updates
Covid: The Science Will Save Us
Our Year in Review
In one of my earliest posts in March 2020, I wrote, “Science will save us.” It is still true.
It’s slower than most people want and all of us need, but the science is happening. What we have seen over the last year is one-patient-at-a-time scientific discovery in action. Questions are posed; hypotheses generated; and bit by bit the truth is revealed.
At the start of this crisis we knew nothing, less than nothing: only that some people had a “weird” pneumonia. By late January, we knew the bug, its gene sequence, and that it could move from person to person. By March we knew it was in Boston, big time. By May we knew that between most of Massachusetts sheltering in place and turning most of our hospitals into COVID-19 wards and ICUs, we had averted disaster here.
What do I mean by averting disaster? I mean, it kept the hospitals from being overwhelmed. It kept us doctors from having to institute “Crisis Standards of Care” (aka rationing). It kept us from looking like California where patients lie on gurneys in the gift shop and funeral homes are turning bodies away.
We’ve learned how coronavirus spreads, when, and from whom. We’ve learned what decreases the risk of it spreading (masks, being outside, air…
