Here’s why the coronavirus is about all of us — even the young and healthy

This week, Boise State University closed its classrooms, and some of you think it’s overreacting. To all the healthy younger folks who are pretty sure they’ll survive COVID-19, I want you to know that it’s not about you. It’s about the hospital beds — the place you go if you break a leg, or fall off a mountain bike. When regular patients come in, the hospital staff just moves from room to room, “the doctor will be here soon, I’ll be back in a few minutes.” That’s what we’re used to.

But when you go in with your corona fever and sneezing, no one has immunity to you. That means staff must gown up, double gloves, put on a respirator, and each time they leave your pressurized room, they need to strip off all of that potentially infected mess, pack it properly and scrub themselves down.

You see, there is no vaccination for health workers, so those brave souls will be exposed to you and others over and over. There aren’t enough test kits in the United States to check doctors and nurses, so they won’t be screened until they have full-blown symptoms. Your sneeze can take out a soldier — just like that. And if you need an oxygen mask for a few days or weeks, that’s a mask and pressurized room that another patient can’t have. How many of these cases do you think our hospitals can handle?

I’ve heard some of you complain, “We’re not all going to die!” You are right, but you are not the point. You can’t stop the spread, but you can help “spread it out.” If we are careful, cases will trickle in, instead of flooding hospitals. Large groups of people in a church or bar are all the same to the virus. A single such gathering can cause a spike in cases, maybe two or three people in a group of 100 get sick. But multiply that across all the gatherings, and you’ll fill every isolation bed in a week.

Sadly, that is what our brothers and sisters in Italy are suffering. The doctors have to triage so desperately that not everyone gets to live.

And that’s where you come in — this is the part about you. Because they will give you an oxygen mask, since you are young and were healthy. You will get the mask, but you can’t share it. And no matter how badly you might want to help the old guy or your grandmother, you can’t. And neither can the doctors or nurses.

Giorgio Gori, the mayor of Bergamo, said that in some cases in Lombardy, the gap between resources and the enormous influx of patients “forced the doctors to decide not to intubate some very old patients,” essentially leaving them to die.

“Were there more intensive care units,” he said, in a New York Times article, “it would have been possible to save more lives.”