[conspire] What it's like being an ICU nurse right now

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

…with COVID-denying family.

This is a “long piece is long” from a friend who’s a Bay Area ICU nurse and who’s been working COVID wards this year. Burn ward? Totes fine with her. She’s a super tough cookie; anything hard makes it an “I’m going to effing nail this ten ways.”

But 2020, man, 2020 was a different thing entirely.

https://twonursestalking.substack.com/p/covid-fox-news-america-and-me <https://twonursestalking.substack.com/p/covid-fox-news-america-and-me>

On her long point, I’ve half wondered if part of the subtext of the whole “herd immunity” (sans vaccine) strategy was misunderstanding the Renaissance economic boom post-plague, often attributed to the population loss after the plague:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance#Black_Death <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance#Black_Death>

The reason Italy was hard hit is not hard: it’s a matter of geography, and how important maritime transit was there. If you look, Italy is *far* more coastal than any other country in Europe except Greece. Add to that the fact that the quarantine (then not a quarantine, as that was a later Venetian invention) was too short to escape the plague's life cycle. When Venice increased the isolation from trente to quarante (30 days to 40), that’s when the plague started to clear. (Only to return with a vengeance in the 1630s, when it killed as much as 69% of the Italian population in some areas.)

A good chunk of why the Renaissance prospered was because of the decline of the Catholic church’s powers, as outlined in this piece about the 1606 Venetian Interdict:

http://www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20040921.html <http://www.seattlecatholic.com/article_20040921.html>

Yes, that is indirectly because of how people changed their relationship with their faith after so so so many people had died.

Unfortunately, the folks in the US that are like my friend’s family? Far more resistant to change than most.

Oh, and we still have the plague in about 20 countries at any given time, just FYI.


Deirdre
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