How Iowa Mishandled the Coronavirus Pandemic - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Iowa Is What Happens When Government Does Nothing The story of the coronavirus in the state is one of government inaction in the name of freedom and personal responsibility. Elaine Godfrey December 3, 2020
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The story of the coronavirus in this state is one of government inaction in the name of freedom and personal responsibility.
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Perencevich and other public-health experts predict that the state’s lax political leadership will result in a “super peak” over the holidays, and thousands of preventable deaths in the weeks to come. “We know the storm’s coming,” Perencevich said. “You can see it on the horizon.”
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Joe English, a 37-year-old respiratory therapist, spends every day traveling between hospital units, hooking up seriously ill COVID-19 patients to ventilators or ECMO machines. When there’s nothing left to be done, English is the one who turns off those machines; he’s done so at least 50 times in the past few months. “What I’m seeing [among health-care workers] is just frustration, desperation,” English told me. “People have been acting like we’ve been fighting a war for months.”
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There is a name for this feeling, says Kevin Doerschug, the director of the hospital’s medical ICU: moral distress, or the sense of loss and helplessness associated with health-care workers navigating limitations in space, treatment, and personnel
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A recent New York Times analysis clearly showed that states with the tightest COVID-19 restrictions have managed to keep cases per capita lower than states with few restrictions.
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What makes all of this suffering and death exponentially more painful is the simple fact that much of it was preventable
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Democrats in Iowa believe that Reynolds’s inaction has always been about politics. Early on, she’d assumed an important role making sure that Trump would win Iowa in the November election, State Senator Joe Bolkcom, who represents Iowa City, told me. “She did that by making people feel comfortable” about going out to eat, going to bars, and going back to school. “She mimicked Trump’s posture” to get him elected. Ultimately, Reynolds was successful in her efforts: Trump won Iowa by 8 points. But Iowans lost much more.
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Iowa’s problem is not that residents don’t want to do the right thing, or that they have some kind of unique disregard for the health of their neighbors. Instead, they looked to elected leaders they trust to tell them how to navigate this crisis, and those leaders, including Trump and Reynolds, told them they didn’t need to do much at all.
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Which means that not only are health-care professionals tasked with saving sick Iowans’ lives, but it’s also fallen on them to communicate the truth about the pandemic.
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The crisis in Iowa’s hospitals could be improved in a matter of weeks if Iowans started wearing a mask whenever they leave the house and stopped spending time indoors with people outside their households.
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Without state leadership on board, none of those changes will happen. “The endgame of uncontrolled spread is a choice between massive death and suffering and overflowing hospitals, or shutting things down,” he said. “This is the equivalent [of] choosing between death or amputation—when you could have had an earlier surgery, which would have been painful but would have prevented this scenario from developing in the first place.”
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Reynolds needs to order bars closed and restaurants to move to takeout only, at least until the surge is over, public-health experts told me. Reynolds and other state leaders could frame mask wearing and self-isolation as a matter of patriotic duty. “We need to make the right thing to do the easy thing to do,” T
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right now, Iowa is on a disastrous path. Experts expect to see a spike in COVID-19 cases in the state roughly one week from now, two weeks after the Thanksgiving holiday. That spike will likely precede a surge in hospitalizations and, eventually, a wave of new deaths—maybe as many as 80 a day, Perencevich, the infectious-disease doctor, estimates. Add Christmas and New Year’s to the mix, and Iowans can expect to see nothing less than a tsunami