Let me say this first, as a human and a physician, I am sorry that Dr. Paul has contracted the coronavirus. I wish him a quick recovery. However, I am mad at the system that prioritizes his testing, and I feel anger towards his privileged self. He is cutting in-line and that is absolutely unfair to the rest of us.
Rand Paul claimed that he had the testing out of “abundance of caution” because he travels a lot. I am actually skeptical of his claim. What I have learned in medicine is always ask two questions: why seek medical attention and why now? There was a reason he got tested now and not two weeks ago or a month from now. There was something worrying him that led him to call his provider and request testing. My guess is he either had contact with someone with the coronavirus or he had mild symptoms. If I were a betting man I would bet on the latter. I bet he had symptoms that he does not want to explain. See, if he explains he has symptoms, then you have to ask for how long he has had them. He also has to explain why you did not stay home earlier if he was not feeling well. But if he admitted he had symptoms and ignored him, it could make him liable to whoever was near him and contracted it too. It’s simpler to fib. The privileged people can get away with a simple fib like that. However, his fibbing is actually fairly minor issue. I am aware that the coronavirus symptoms can start mild and nonspecific and it is human nature to initially minimize them.
The bigger issue is that there are lines for getting testing and he used his power and privilege to cut in line. This isn’t just a minor issue. Let me explain why. In my hospital, if you have had contact with a coronavirus patient you are expected to continue to come to work. The burden is on you to practice safe practices. If you do get sick, you are then supposed to call in sick until you feel better, a period that is actually poorly defined but may be up to two weeks. But then, during these two weeks if your symptoms are mild you cannot get tested. So, in that time period you may be putting your family and loved ones in danger for symptoms too mild to get tested for, but severe enough to be contagious and dangerous to the lives of others. During that period your colleagues have to work harder, work longer hours, and expose themselves more to the coronavirus. We know fatigue also increases their risk of infection. It would be nice to have health care workers back at work sooner. It would be even better if we kept coronavirus exposed and asymotomatic coronavirus positive health care workers, much like Senator Paul claims, away from vulnerable patients. Even under quarantine these health care workers are coming to work and not exercising social distancing. We could do that if we could test people easily. It would be simple to test health care workers regularly (say weekly) and screen for the coronavirus positive individuals who should not be working with people. We don’t do that because we don’t have enough testing. By not doing it, we are also putting people's lives in danger. But Senator Paul? He got privilege.
It’s even worse than that. Currently, anyone in a hospital who is suspected of having the coronavirus is put in special contact precautions in an isolation unit of the hospital. Health care workers have to put on and take off expensive and severely limited protective gear every time they interact them. This is not a small problem. For most states only about 1 in 4 to 1 in 10 patients who are suspected of the coronavirus test positive for it. We could free-up a lot of resources if we could test people quickly and at least remove them from the isolation unit. But we have a problem with limited resources. In some hospitals Covid-19 testing is taking 5 days to process during which all the precautions have to continue. Think about that. Here we are running out of safety gear because we cannot test patients fast enough, but Senator Paul can cut in line and have his results in 24 hours.
So, there you have it. That's America for you today. Rand Paul probably has a personal concierge physician he can call on the phone who can pull strings and get him tested in no time at all. The rest of us are fighting for our lives. There is the virus that fell into our society, and there are diseases we live with chronically. I think it would be easier to get rid of the coronavirus than systemic injustice of our privileged rulers.
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