Progress for tomorrow: Preparing for the next disaster
KELLERMAN: I don't they know about it for one, and also, I think that we're missing an opportunity with families to be teaching now what they can do and what their kids can do that doesn't involve anti-virals or vaccines. You know, we have a fancy term for it, you know, social distancing.
HEALY: How do you teach children to socially distance?
KELLERMAN: How do you teach children to socially distance? You don't. But how do you teach parents to know when they need to keep their kid out of school, when they don't go to the party or go to the theatre, when you stop shaking hands with everybody you meet on the street, when you start carrying alcohol to wash your hands 20 or 30 times a day. I mean, the fact of the matter is we may do more good with non-pharmacological counter-measures.
This is a virus that is transmitted the way a lot of viruses are transmitted. It's very infectious, but the fact of the matter is, we may not have modern medicine to save us. We may have to rely on the good old-fashioned things like social distancing or quarantine. That's the most effective strategy that helped the world out of SARS, much less transmissible than influenza. Nonetheless, I don't think we're getting that word out, and that is something every family can do and learn and understand now before they have to react.
HEALY: What about the children?
ATKINSON: May I add – I think if you look at the – just even what we see in surveys about the American public, three issues come to mind immediately – access to care, quality of care, cost of care – not necessarily in that order, depends where you are in the sequence on any given day. And then you begin to add those things that are perhaps less frequently talked about such as emergency preparedness. People assume in many cases that if they have something goes wrong at home, something breaks, or if they break, they'll just show up at an emergency department and it would be fixed. And I think it is correct that our nation's trauma centers and emergency departments are way over-taxed. We do need to have more capability and we need that yesterday not tomorrow. We need that today for sure.
On the other hand, it has been my own experience, and certainly the WakeMed experience in North Carolina has been that when we've gone out to tell the individual story, when we've been out to see businesses to say we need help with this preparedness.
An example – one of the beverage companies in our community, we went to them and said we want some of your former trucks. We want these trucks that carried the drinks yesterday, but we want them to carry supplies and to rebuild them. They gave them to us. We went out to other companies to select money for preparedness and stuff where the private sector helped the public sector or vice-versa. But I think someone has to imagine what the solution will look like, not wait for someone to give them that solution and make that fit locally. And there are great solutions to be found to some of these response communities without waiting for someone else to hand us an answer.
advertisement
