How many Americans has Trump’s BS killed? How many Americans have needlessly died due to the coronavirus pandemic? It’s not clear that we will ever know the real tally of “Trump’s Death Toll” #trumpsdeathtoll.
We are now in a grey zone where the overwhelm of hospitals and the shortage of PPE, medicines, ICU beds and ventilators are forcing life and death decisions that in normal times would not be made.
“As of now, all COVID-19 patients are to be designated as DNR B. This means no CPR.”
That is a quote from a New Jersey hospital chief of critical care. If you need resuscitation there and are even suspected of having COVID, tough luck. You would be done. That wouldn’t normally happen. Doctors wouldn’t quit until there was no hope. Many would not survive anyway (17% of all don’t make it out of the hospital; slimmer for respiratory patients). How many people would have survived if they had been resuscitated? We may never know. How many people have been DNR’d against their wishes? We may never know. The crisis is changing the level of care patients can get, and it’s getting worse. Much, much worse.
How many COVID deaths should we attribute to an overwhelmed healthcare system? Nobody is tracking that yet, as far as I can tell. Anyone counting deaths under hospital policy or doctors’ decisions to Do Not Resuscitate (DNR), which can override a patient’s or family’s wishes? What percentage of those would have lived under normal circumstances?
Will we ever know the total cost of American lives that could have been avoided?
I have not defined Trump’s Death Toll as the total global number of COVID deaths. But, a good case could be made that Trump’s disbanding the NSC pandemic team prevented early containment of the outbreak. That was the team that would sound the alarm and assisted containment of early outbreaks, even in China. Early containment could have prevented the pandemic, and thus ALL of American COVID deaths. But China misstepped, and we didn’t have that team to instantly respond during the earliest times, the Golden Moment, when the disease could possibly have been fully contained.
Neither have I defined it as the total American COVID deaths. Though, early testing of all inbound travellers and aggressive South Korean-style contact tracking and isolation could have likely contained the outbreak within the US, at least for a while to give us time to prepare. Our near-total failure of early testing, again, could be attributed to Trump’s dismantling of the NSC pandemic team.
Now that the pandemic has run wild in America, only stemmed by the blunt costly force of social distancing, I am focused on the number of patients that die because our healthcare system becomes overwhelmed. The grey edges of that has begun. Trump’s Death Toll tally, the avoidable (those that would have survived with adequate care), tragic COVID-19 death count is very likely no longer zero.
But who will drill into each case and determine if the scale of the crisis caused each death? What depth of grey becomes a tragic, avoidable tally? With the case of DNR orders, we may never know the true number. But we should be tracking and tallying these life and death decisions that doctors are now being forced to make, in the triage of the disaster that is, if any one person can be blamed, Trump’s making. The scale of avoidable deaths, had he tried, may exceed those of our soldiers in wartimes who gave their lives to protect Americans.
Those whose heart stops for any reason, (who “code”) will die without resuscitation. People who are denied resuscitation (DNR’d) because of healthcare overwhelm are part of those impacted by the flattenable, avoidable extreme peak of COVID-19. The grim statistic of any and all such avoidable deaths--that were in some way caused by healthcare system overwhelm (especially exceeding hospital, equipment and supplies capacity-- must be tallied. That number has so far been kept low because of everyone else sacrificing in lockdown, and healthcare workers and others performing miracles to get supplies and ventilators in time.
We need to ask the press to track that number of avoidable deaths. The Washington Post says it is tracking every known U.S. death. But it is not (yet) providing that statistic of deaths due to overwhelm. You can email this reporter to ask for it
The man with the responsibility to protect Americans must be held accountable. We need to highlight Trump’s responsibility, failures and outright counter-productive actions and messages. His anti-leadership continues. Like yesterday, saying people can decide for themselves if they want to wear masks or scarves (instead of highly recommending it, per CDC recommendations), and his continued refusal to issue a national lockdown or actual coordinated use of the Defense Production Act.
Using Trump’s own tool: catch-names (monikers), we can hold him accountable. Spreading “Trump’s Death Toll” #trumpsdeathtoll to social media, the press and to politicians is one potentially effective way. He won’t like it.