Dr. Rosen:       Is anyone here concerned about the lack of the usual isolation protocol for the Corona-Virus. I would hesitate to go into any store or pharmacy without a mask and rubber gloves because so many shoppers could be infected and appear healthy for a week before they become sick.

Dr. Edwards:   Certainly, the very idea of a wide-spread lethal virus and just avoiding everyone by 6 feet is not only silly but dangerously lethal. I’ve never heard of such a thing in all of my training. Have you?

Dr. Milton:      The very idea of closing business as a mechanism of isolation technique is so horrendous. But the politics involved in issuing such a strange isolation procedure is unheard of in medicine. To demand “avoidance” rather than “isolation” will only prolong the epidemic which has grown into a pandemic because of political ignorance and misguidance.

Dr. Ruth:         Most of the directives have come from politicians such as mayors, governors, or other political leaders first. To see the Governor of New York hail forth as if he was in a medical or public health interview is beyond stupidity. And his state has the largest population of Corona Virus disease, possibly in the world. Aren’t they even able to extrapolate backwards?

Dr. Michelle:   But what do you make of the medical experts going along with this?

Dr. Yancy:       In the world of politics, sometimes it is stupidity that rises to the top like cream. But if you are in that arena, you can never forget the chain of command. We’ve seen that currently when government officials are fired for what they say even if valid because of fear how the public misinterprets it.

Dr. Sam:          Getting back to closing business is beyond reasonable virus control. Closing a business doesn’t even begin to comprehend the economic failure of the directive and it also fails the basics of infection control. A business that is not doing business will go under. How else can the owner meet his overhead, his rent, his employee’s salaries, and pay his supply lines? This will bring down our country. It will produce a depression. Just read what the depression did to our parents 75 years ago. Many didn’t make it.

Dr. Rosen:       Reading Lawrence Reed’s commentary of the Great Depression is very illuminating. As he tells it: By1933, the numbers produced by that comedy of errors were staggering. National unemployment rates reached 25 percent, but within some individual cities, the statistics seemed beyond comprehension. Cleveland reported that 50 percent of its labor force was unemployed; Toledo, 80 percent; and some States even averaged over 40 percent. Because of the dual-edged sword of declining revenues and increasing welfare demands, the burden on the cities pushed many municipalities to the brink. Schools in New York shut down, and teachers in Chicago were owed some $20 million. Private schools, in many cases, failed completely. One government study found that by 1933 some fifteen hundred colleges had gone belly-up, and book sales plummeted. Chicago’s library system did not purchase a single book in a year-long period.¹⁵

Dr. Joseph: Ret: Maybe you folks are beginning to see the events of the 1929 disaster. It seems to me as a retired physician, that we are going to repeat the great depression. Our president seems to be doing the same thing Hoover did in 1929. Although he was elected as a New York Republican, I think he’s playing by the Democratic rule book—spending what we don’t have. Is he about to erase all the great things that he has accomplished in the past 4 years?

Dr. Rosen:       I think your perspective of your childhood may be what we can expect if we don’t end this epidemic. We can end it in two weeks if we did what China did after their 3 months of failure. Everybody has to wear a mask or this epidemic will never be over because people are contagious during the latter part of the incubation period. It’s not spread by touching surfaces on which an infected person has coughed or sneezed. It’s by being close to that cough or sneeze so it’s inhaled that’s critical. The viruses on the surfaces will be dead in 3 or 4 hours if they’re not in a liquid. Since the incubation period has now been shown to be more like 14 days instead of 4, people will be coughing viruses for 8-10 days instead of 3 or 4. Therefore, EVERYONE has to wear a mask just like the Chinese, after 3 months of unfortunate delay. They enforced it with citations and the threat of jail for those who failed to wear a mask. And within two weeks there were no new cases. And our first infection was on Jan 10, 2020. Here we are after three months with new infections every day. The county next to us had a new outbreak last week and they now require everyone in public to wear a mask. Hurrah! Just like in China, after three months one county will be free of new diseases in two weeks.

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