Hundreds of Doctors Sign Letter to Trump Warning of Consequences of Shutdown as 'Mass Casualty Incident'
A coalition of more than 500 physicians has insisted that lockdowns are hurting the health of everyday Americans and wrote a letter to President Donald Trump to urge action to end shutdowns across the nation.
“We write to you today to express our alarm over the exponentially growing negative health consequences of the national shutdown,” the physicians wrote, according to a copy of the letter.
“In medical terms, the shutdown was a mass casualty incident,” they continued, adding that millions of Americans face critical health care issues.
“These include 150,000 Americans per month who would have had a new cancer detected through routine screening that hasn’t happened, millions who have missed routine dental care to fix problems strongly linked to heart disease/death, and preventable cases of stroke, heart attack, and child abuse. Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%.”
The physicians noted that other Americans are at less serious levels, but have still been impacted by lockdowns as they have increased unhealthy behaviors.
“Liquor sales have increased 300-600%, cigarettes sales have increased, rent has gone unpaid, family relationships have become frayed, and millions of well-child check-ups have been missed,” the letter said.
They continued on to say that “hundreds of millions” of Americans are suffering because economic hardships are impacting their lives and health.
“These are people who currently are solvent, but at risk should economic conditions worsen. Poverty and financial uncertainty is closely linked to poor health. A continued shutdown means hundreds of millions of Americans will downgrade a level.”
The doctors said that these Americans are lost in the daily tallying of new coronavirus cases dominating the media.
“The downstream health effects of deteriorating a level are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error. It is impossible to overstate the short, medium, and long-term harm to people’s health with a continued shutdown.
“Losing a job is one of life’s most stressful events, and the effect on a person’s health is not lessened because it also has happened to 30 million other people,” they continued. “Keeping schools and universities closed is incalculably detrimental for children, teenagers, and young adults for decades to come.
“The millions of casualties of a continued shutdown will be hiding in plain sight, but they will be called alcoholism, homelessness, suicide, heart attack, stroke, or kidney failure.”
Dr. Simone Gold, who organized the letter, said that for most Americans, shutdown is doing more harm than the virus would.
“When you look at the data of the deaths and the critically ill, they are patients who were very sick to begin with,” she said, “There’s always exceptions. … But when you look at the pure numbers, it’s overwhelmingly patients who are in nursing homes and patients with serious underlying conditions.
“Meaning, that that’s where our resources should be spent. I think it’s terribly unethical … part of the reason why we let [the virus] fly through the nursing homes is because we’re diverting resources across society at large. We have limited resources we should put them where it’s killed people.”
Dr. Scott Barbour, an Atlanta orthopedic surgeon, said when the facts are in, the disease may well appear less lethal than many have claimed.
“The vast majority of the people that contract this disease are asymptomatic or so minimally symptomatic that they’re not even aware that they’re sick. And so the denominator in our calculation of mortality rate is far greater than we think,” he said.
“The risk of dying from COVID is relatively small when we consider these facts.”
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