They are trying to tell you something. Normally, when one stumbles upon a building that has caught fire, people tend not to test the temperature of the flames. But not with Covid. With Covid people seemed determined to consistently dance with death and worship at the Altar marked, “Own the Libs.”
BILLINGS — Nurses fill the hospital room to turn a patient from his stomach to his back. The ventilator forcing air into him is most effective when he’s on his stomach, so he is in that position most hours of the day, sedated and paralyzed by drugs. Lying on his stomach all those hours has produced sores on his face, and one nurse dabs at the wounds. The dark lesions are insignificant given his current state, but she continues just the same, gently, soothingly, appearing to whisper to him as she works.
The man has been a patient at Billings Clinic for nearly a month, most of that time in the hospital’s intensive care unit. He is among other patients, room after room of them, with the same grim tubes inserted down their throats. They have covid-19 — the vast majority unvaccinated against the virus, the hospital says. Visitors generally aren’t permitted in these rooms, but the man’s mother comes most days to gaze through a glass window for the allowed 15 minutes.
This all happened Friday. He was dead, at age 24, by Sunday morning. The hospital’s morgue cart arrived at the ICU — as it frequently has these days — then the room was sterilized, another patient took the man’s place, and the cycle began again. In the past week, 14 people have died of covid here, the state’s largest hospital.
Montana is not a populous state at all. Arizona for example, has roughly seven times more people, but last Friday Montana reported roughly half of the cases AZ has been averaging, over 1,200. For Republicans unwilling to absorb the math, that is about 1 in 1,000 Montanans in one day.
And contrary to earlier eras of the pandemic, the clinic is forced to put up signs asking the public not to mistreat its staff, which is common apparently.
Nurses are quitting for many reasons, fatigue, fear, mistreatment, doctors are being asked their political affiliation. Dr. Sara Nyquist says she has been asked by a patient if she was a Republican or a Democrat.
And she wonders how we got here as a people.
One would think, deep down she knows.
-ROC
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