“My daughter is an emergency room nurse at St Joseph’s Hospital,” my patient began telling me during our consultation last week. “This is her 9/11, I told her.”
Americans fought a similar battle against the Spanish flu epidemic, which claimed 675,000 Americans and between 50 million and 100 million lives around the world.
A new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report indicates that young people are not only getting the virus but are also being hospitalized because of it.
President Trump has promised to unite the full force of the federal government with the full power of American enterprise to respond the China Wuhan virus – and the response from the private sector has been overwhelming.
It has become all too clear that the coronavirus pandemic is not just a matter of global health, but also an economic issue. Indeed, the virus is having a major impact on the American and global economies as it spreads rapidly in the United States and around the world.
America can go on lockdown for a month or more, but those days need to be used to prepare to emerge and get back to the essentials of daily life. We have to defeat the coronavirus, not let the virus defeat us.
We need to rise above partisan politics and rely on each other and the God in whom we as a nation trust. We need to not be defined by the crisis itself, but defined by our courage in facing it.
According to President Trump’s enemies, his response to the coronavirus lies somewhere between reckless indifference and negligent homicide. Nothing could be further from the truth.