By KAREN PARKER
County Line Publisher Emeritus
I had an opportunity to go undercover to the frontlines last week, when a stubborn lung infection sent me on a three-day rest at Mayo Clinic in Sparta. It’s amazing what some people will do to eat someone else’s cooking. The hospital food was quite excellent by the way, although I cannot say the same for the torture beds.
At the Sparta hospital, anyone with Covid-19 is shuffled off to La Crosse. Despite that, the hospital was quite full, and I snagged a suddenly opened bed.
But to get to that bed, I needed a negative test. The list of virus symptoms is quite long, and although I had only one, Mayo wasn’t taking any chances. Everyone coming in contact with me wore yellow PPE and changed it often.
Finally came the nasal swab, and, yes, it does feel like your brain is being swabbed. Three hours later, the negative test came back. Now mind you, at the same time was learning on CNN that it took eight days for the mayor of Atlanta to get her results back. Despite quarantining, she managed to spread it to her husband and children.
What? Do I have better health insurance than Atlanta’s mayor? Probably not. What I do have is the luck of living in an area not yet hard hit by the virus. As a Mayo patient, my lab work is done in house. Even Mayo likely has a limit on testing and could not expedite hundreds of thousands of test results in short order, as is being asked of labs in hard-hit states like Georgia, Florida, Texas, etc.
It is a vivid reminder of the patchwork approach we have with this pandemic. Even though we had nearly six months to deal with this, there still is no national strategy. Is this the same country that engineered the invasion of Normandy? Had we been this incompetent in World War II, Hitler’s head would be on Mount Rushmore.
Meanwhile, the bodies pile up, hospitals rent refrigerated trucks to hold them, and some still refer to it as a “hoax.”
Wow, it would take real dedication to kill off family members to perpetrate a hoax and/or make the Trump administration look bad.
Most of the Mayo staff were calm, but freely admitted they never saw a pandemic coming when they chose a medical career. One older fellow said his kids were urging him to take retirement, but since he was a late starter in nursing and had little retirement built up, he was staying. “What would I do at home anyway?” he asked. A young woman, close to term, was clearly looking forward to maternity leave.
For “front-line” workers, they were not overwrought. Then it occurred to me: their employer protects them. No one gets in the front door without a symptom screen, a temperature check and a mask.
Compare that with the treatment given to store clerks, who all day long are subjected to cads without masks leaning into their faces, coughing, sneezing, snorting, laughing and propelling their ugly viruses onto their poor victims. Is it any wonder that this group is the most infected?
It would be unlucky for you if you had to work in Massachusetts for Mountaire, one of the country’s largest chicken-processing plants. It’s owned by Ronald Cameron, a huge Trump and Republican party donor. When he asked the President to send meat plant workers back to work, Trump obliged.
No one seemed to mind that hundreds of workers had tested positive. If employees wanted PPE equipment, they had to buy their own. To gild the lily, the line was speeded up, hazard pay was revoked, and the USDA and OSHA looked the other way at the company’s health and safety violations.
So, not only do we have an industry with one of the highest rates of injury (yes, that was a thumb in your package of chicken), but also, of the 30,000 workers in the food and health-care sectors, 238 have died.
It’s a little different life from being able to work from home, wouldn’t you say?
I couldn’t help but notice the Mayo disclaimer denoted the COVID-19 test was free. But, if you need treatment, heaven help you. A few days without insurance will cost many thousands, and time in the ICU will double that.
The pandemic and upside-down economy has caused five million people to lose their health insurance. I wonder if some of those were people I had seen several years back at Tomah High School for a public meeting against Obamacare. They had strutted around with signs depicting Obama with a Hitler mustache, alerting us to the coming socialism.
If you add up all of us on Medicare or Medicaid, along with those who work government jobs, it’s a fact: more than half of us are on “socialized” medicine right now.
If this pandemic has not shown us that we are desperately in need of a better system of healthcare for all Americans, then I don’t what it will take. We should wonder how many of the 136,000 people who died of the virus would still be alive had they not waited to seek treatment because they had no insurance. And that is not right, and if you think it is, it’s time to stop by the ER and have them check you for a heartbeat.
So here is my advice: unless you have super-good health insurance, it’s time to pay attention. Wear a mask when you can’t socially distance yourself. Avoid crowds and enclosed spaces. If you must go to a bar, look for outdoor seating. Shop during quiet times, and learn to love hanging out at home.
No matter your age, this is a disease that can kill you or give you a lifelong disability. Moreover, the treatment can leave you destitute.
Ouch!