Today, the New York Times ran a sobering op-ed by Cornelia Griggs, a pediatric surgery fellow at a large NYC hospital.
Its provocative headline — "A New York Doctor’s Coronavirus Warning: The Sky Is Falling" — gives you a sense of Griggs' grave outlook on the coronavirus pandemic. She writes:
We are living in a global public health crisis moving at a speed and scale never witnessed by living generations. The cracks in our medical and financial systems are being splayed open like a gashing wound. No matter how this plays out, life will forever look a little different for all of us.
It's worth pointing out that just days ago, the Times reported that there do exist contrarians in the research community who argue that the public is overreacting to the threat.
But Griggs wrote that the mood among her peers is gloomy as they prepare for the worst to hit, and potentially overwhelm the medical system in the coming weeks. This dark outlook, from a practicing surgeon, took the web by storm and swiftly started trending on Twitter.
However, Griggs ended her piece on a note of — if not hope — determination, that medical workers and the public alike will rise to the challenge and help each other as best as they can. Here's Griggs again:
I say this not to panic anyone but to mobilize you. We need more equipment and we need it now. Specifically gloves, masks, eye protection and more ventilators. We need our technology friends to be making and testing prototypes to rig the ventilators that we do have to support more than one patient at a time. We need our labs channeling all of their efforts into combating this bug — that means vaccine research and antiviral treatment research, quickly.
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