Waiting Rooms Are Packed With Virus: Why Don’t We Learn?

A short trip down memory’s troubled lane.

Early in 2020, with alarming news coming out of China regarding a new and super-infectious respiratory virus, I wrote an essay invoking an innovative approach to managing emergency departments during outbreaks of infectious disease. It’s extraordinary, really, to read that piece now. Sentences such as:

“As I write these lines, more than 1,000 people have died from the virus, with more than 42,000 infected, the vast majority in China’s Hubei province.”

And:

“Perhaps the coronavirus outbreak has already crested and will peter out with a whimper.”

As we all know there was no whimper. Instead there was a full-throated roar, one that went on and on and on. Almost 7 million have died from Covid. Many more millions are seriously damaged. And the magnitude of the damage done to the stability of the world is practically incalculable.

Pediatric emergency departments weren’t impacted, as it turned out. Given the malignant attraction of Covid for the elderly, and the lockdown measures that erased most normal childhood interactions, children’s hospital ER waiting rooms stood empty. Peds ER docs like me stood around twiddling our thumbs, looking at each other perplexedly and saying things like…