Author: Syndicated

As COVID-19 cases fill emergency rooms and intensive care units across the U.S., local officials have been rushing to convert hotels, convention centers, and city parks into new hospital spaces. Amid the scramble, many physicians, architects, and health care consultants are already talking about how modern hospital designs could change to avoid a repeat of the current national crisis One clear lesson: Modern hospitals often lack the flexibility to accommodate a sudden surge of patients. In particular, many hospitals have been running out of space and resources to treat Covid-19 patients with severe symptoms, while at the same time...

“It’s really a way to cause change and cause action to happen on behalf of these people that are affected in one way or another by the story. And to have people form opinions to make their mind up about what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s real and what’s not. And the only way for us to do that is to tell the stories.” – Bryan Woolston, photographer for Reuters Comparing the pandemic to war, as some stories have been doing over the past month, is fraught for many reasons — among them the skewed framing it may convey. The...

As the coronavirus spreads across the United States, VA health care facilities are struggling with shortages of workers and the equipment necessary to protect employees from contracting the virus. The Department of Veterans Affairs is responsible for the health care of 9 million military veterans. In recent weeks more than 1,900 VA health care workers have become sick with the coronavirus, according to agency documents. Twenty have died. Another 3,600 of the 300,000-plus VA health care employees are quarantined and unable to work because they have been exposed to the virus, according to VA figures. More than 5,700 veterans...

April 2020 will be the month when mass incarceration becomes mass murder in America: large-scale, foreseeable, preventable. Amidst all the tragedy that COVID-19 will inflict upon us, the reckless and avoidable deaths of tens of thousands of people in prisons, jails, and detention centers may be our nation’s greatest source of shame. Infection curves will be maximally steep in incarcerated populations Right now, the virus is insinuating itself into every one of the nation’s 6,000 prisons, jails, and detention centers. It is arriving on the breath or bodies of employees arriving for work or of prisoners being booked in...