600 Crazy MDs Declare Imminent Mass Casualty Incident

This is why you can’t really trust anyone anymore, beginning with your own doctors. especially if your doctors happen to be  religious, right-wing Republican Doctors (RRRDs)

RRRDs (Religious Right Wing Republican Doctors) are unreliable because they can be led by the nose to endorse positions that have no validity in either the literature, the statistics, or basic common sense. Here’s some evidence:

“More than 600 doctors signed a letter urging President Trump to end the nationwide coronavirus shutdowns and referred to orders issued by states that keep businesses closed as a “mass casualty incident” with devastating consequences,” according to the definitely right-wing Washington Examiner.  (Similar reporting also comes from the now  lukewarm cheering section at Fox News.)

I am not impressed. You could get 600 doctors to claim that the earth is flat, and some of them would actually believe it.

Getting through medical school doesn’t prove that you’re actually a genius. Want proof? Ben Carson.

Republican doctors, in particular, seem to suffer from a weaker grip on reality. and religious Republican doctors are the worst fraction of this cohort, having already subscribed to two bizarre ideations (religion and Republicanism.)

The more than 600 doctors (which could mean 601, of course) who signed this letter to the president, opined that the negative consequences of statewide stay-at-home orders, including patients missing checkups with doctors, increases in substance abuse and alcohol abuse, and negative financial implications, are building up to a “mass casualty incident.”  They have no numbers to define the size or scope of this mass casualty incident, but they have to be thinking of more than the 100,000 who have died so far from the virus.

Here are the facts. No statewide stay at home order has prevented the delivery of emergency services, although the concentration of COVID-19 cases in some communities has definitely affected the ability of the hospitals in those communities to deliver crisis intervention services, but that’s a function of the epidemic itself -and the administration’s slow and weak response to the crisis – rather than the shut-down orders.

Stay-at-home orders were never applied to regular medical visits, just as they never applied to shopping expeditions to supermarkets, drug stores, restaurants (for take out), home improvement centers and around 85% of the other functional businesses in the United States.

The only times that patients missed regular checkups (as I have) was when the doctors chose not to expose themselves unnecessarily to potential sources of infection…and cancelled the appointments themselves.

The idea that people would drink and use drugs more in a crisis environment is a no-brainer…but we would still be in a crisis environment with or without stay-at-home orders, and the relaxation of curfews would, in fact, facilitate the acquisition of drugs and alcohol, without reducing the demand for them.

There are definite financial impacts from the mythical shut-down of the economy, with around 12% of the work force being laid off. That’s 12% rather than 15% because everyone is forgetting to deduct the average monthly unemployment rate of 3-4%.

The shutdown is a media myth. Eighty-eight percent of the economy has remained up and running. You could have bought a new car or get your old one repaired, get a tooth pulled, delivery a baby, pick up lumber, rent a tool or rent a car, or go sky diving (if you want to go sky diving) in March, April and May.

This letter is a put-up job. Some Republican operative  (and remember, the Republican operative could have been an influential doctor or an influential pharmaceutical salesperson) wrote it, got a group of doctors to sign it as an open letter to the president which was then released only to the Right Wing Media.

By the way, there were 950,000 licensed physicians in the United States in 2016. (Statistic says there are 525,500 specialists in 2019 so the rest must be primary care physicians, which is the usual proportion.)

Those 600 doctors represent 0.000631579 of the total number of physicians in the U.S. That’s six-ten thousandth of one percent but we all know that all doctors are dedicated to the public welfare and would never mislead us, right?

Remember Ben Carson?

I am not impressed. Are you?