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

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Dire Red (deirdre at deirdre.net):

> …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>

Seconding, here, Deirdre's point that this piece by our friend is worth
reading, partly as a reminder of, and an attempt to understand, the
large number of people who are COVID-denialists (such as our friend's
family members).

> 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. 

Actually, I can think of one other European country that's always been
extremely linked to coastal trade, and where everything is close to the
coast:  Norway.

Even the name Norway (Norge) indicates the matter, as it means "the
north way".  The country was literally created by uniting (well,
conquering) the petty kingdoms up and down the coast, and basically the
country's lifeblood was coastal commerce, just as the Dominion of Canada
was a product of, and united by, the east-west railroad.

Not surprisingly, Norway was among the European countries worst hit by
the Black Death (1349-50).  I read some estimates that it had
approximately a 50% death rate in Norway, and along with the Little Ice
Age reduced Norway to an impoverished hick backwater of Denmark for 400
years, having until then been an independent kingdom.

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

Note the map at the bottom of this page:
https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps/index.html
(Madagascar stands out, in a bad way.)