I hope your friend pulls through with some comfort soon!

This is almost a more terrifying threat than the virus itself. It's the scenario I had to use to verbally slap some sense into some folks who were all "LOL boomer doomer let 'em die"... well in that case you better plan on not having any car wrecks, household or industrial accidents, broken bones, personal relapses or flareups, new diagnoses, or any other formerly routine encounter-causing incident.

If I get another kidney stone like the one that recalibrated my entire personal worldview of pain and addiction 10 years ago, and the hospitals were full, I think I'd commit suicide. There's no way I'd endure it (FTR I've passed multiple stones without treatment, enduring some pain, but that particular one was... ugh I can't even describe it I couldn't even breathe)

~~~~~

The piecemeal implementation of lockdowns is incredibly frustrating. The midwest and outer coasts are taking it seriously while the rest of the country fiddles. What the everfucking fuck. As a country we're still setting ourselves up for failure. There needs to be a coordinated unified national message and response, but it's far too late. Any curve flattening will be localized, allowing spikes to meander around the country like an undulating waterbed.

I hear people saying "Hey, China's open for business after just a month!". Yeah. If you choose to believe that so be it... but that would only be because they locked the place down hard and built a bunch of hospitals. Meanwhile we still have interstate travel, open bars and beaches, and not even enough tests to begin to understand the scope of WTF we're dealing with yet. Sigh.