Biscuit reflects on COVID-19 concepts that didn’t work.

In honor of our 205-blog post (we missed one day), Biscuit decided to look back on the past six months and reflect on some of the COVID-19 ideas that turned out to be not quite right. Some seemed destined to failure from the start, but many had remarkable enthusiasm. When he looks back now it’s amazing how quickly some of them became antiquated!

1) Field hospitals and hospital ships to care for COVID-19 patients. Amazingly, no one wanted to be locked up in the hospital if they weren’t deathly ill from COVID-19. They particularly did not want to be in a huge stadium or an old ship where they had no privacy and little personal care.

2) A summer lull in COVID-19. A lot of experts thought that the coronavirus would go away during the summer. Unfortunately they never visited Florida, Arizona, Texas, California, etc.

3) Anti-malarial drugs to treat COVID-19. At least they work pretty well for malaria. 

4) COVID-19 Taskforce press conferences. They provided little new information and not much entertainment, but they did start people drinking at 5:00 in the afternoon.

5) Reopening bars. It almost seemed like every time a bar reopened a COVID-19 outbreak ensued. 

6) Washing groceries. Not sure where this idea came from, but the concept that groceries would transmit COVID-19 through their wrappers really made no sense since it is a respiratory virus. It may have helped prevent salmonella outbreaks though.

7) Not wearing masks. Even the experts at the World Health Organization and Dr. Fauci got caught up telling people they didn’t need to wear masks. It was essentially the most important thing they had to do.    

8) Rolling back COVID-19 testing guidelines for asymptomatic individuals. After a few weeks it’s already been retracted. Enough said.

9) Ventilators. Ventilators became the most important device for medical care of COVID-19 in April, but by June it was clear that almost everyone placed on them died. Other less invasive respiratory support became the therapy of choice.

10) Putting COVID-19 patients in nursing homes for convalescence. I suppose it might have been a good idea if they had made sure that they weren’t still infectious! 

Biscuit hopes that the next six months will have fewer failed ideas and more progress in controlling this disease!