Lewis University Faith and Religion during Covid 19 Discussion Questions

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Read the article “Giving up on God” from our Covid-19 readings and write down as essay to answer the following questions:What is the general trend of faith and religiosity in the world?How do you think Covid-19 crisis change/affect people`s approach to religion?Compare your ideas with that of author`s. Is there a contrast, why?

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Readings on the Consequences of
Covid-19
Contents
Contents ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….1
A.
Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………2
The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready? …………………………………………………………………………………………….2
B.
Economic Impact……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 20
Coronavirus: How the pandemic has changed the world economy …………………………………………………… 21
The Pandemic Altered Shopping Habits Beyond Return ……………………………………………………………………… 30
C.
Health ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 32
U.S. Drug-Overdose Deaths Soared Nearly 30% in 2020, Driven by Synthetic Opioids ………………… 33
As humanity ages the numbers of people with dementia will surge …………………………………………………. 38
Covid-19 Deaths to Reverse U.S. Life-Expectancy Gains ……………………………………………………………………… 42
D. Education ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 45
The $670 Billion College-Industrial Complex Is Under Threat From Online School ………………………. 46
E.
Religion/Beliefs ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 48
Giving Up on God…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 49
F.
Suburbanization ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 56
The ‘Great Reshuffling’ Is Shi ing Wealth to the Exurbs ………………………………………………………………………. 57
Covid-19 has persuaded Americans to leave city centres……………………………………………………………………. 59
G.
Increasing Authoritarianism …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 61
The Era of Big Government Is Back …………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 62
No vaccine for cruelty ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… 64
Democracy Under Lockdown ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. 70
Freedom and Stock Market
90
1
Introduction
The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?
The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to
multiply. Much worse is coming.
By Ed Yong
JULY/AUGUST 2018 ISSUE, The Atlantic
Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.
AT 6 O ’ CLOCK IN THE MORNING , shortly after the sun spills over the horizon, the city of
Kikwit doesn’t so much wake up as ignite. Loud music blares from car radios. Shops fly open
along the main street. Dust-sprayed jeeps and motorcycles zoom eastward toward the town’s
bustling markets or westward toward Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s
capital city. The air starts to heat up, its molecules vibrating with absorbed energy. So, too, the
city.
By late morning, I am away from the bustle, on a quiet, exposed hilltop some five miles down
a pothole-ridden road. As I walk, desiccated shrubs crunch underfoot and butterflies flit past.
The only shade is cast by two lines of trees, which mark the edges of a site where more than
200 people are buried, their bodies piled into three mass graves, each about 15 feet wide and
70 feet long. Nearby, a large blue sign says IN MEMORY OF THE VICTIMS OF THE EBOLA
EPIDEMIC IN MAY 1995. The sign is partly obscured by overgrown grass, just as the memory
itself has been occluded by time. The ordeal that Kikwit suffered has been crowded out by the
continual eruption of deadly diseases elsewhere in the Congo, and around the globe.
Emery Mikolo, a 55-year-old Congolese man with a wide, angular face, walks with me. Mikolo
survived his own encounter with Ebola in 1995. As he looks at the resting place of those who
didn’t, his solemn demeanor cracks a bit. In the Congo, when people die, their bodies are
meant to be cleaned by their families. They should be dressed, caressed, kissed, and embraced.
These intense rituals of love and community were corrupted by Ebola, which harnessed them
to spread through entire families. Eventually, of necessity, they were eliminated entirely. Until
Ebola, “no one had ever taken bodies and thrown them together like sacks of manioc,”
Mikolo tells me.
The Congo—and the world—first learned about Ebola in 1976, when a mystery illness
emerged in the northern village of Yambuku. Jean-Jacques Muyembe, then the country’s only
virologist, collected blood samples from some of the first patients and carried them back to
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Kinshasa in delicate test tubes, which bounced on his lap as he trundled down undulating
roads. From those samples, which were shipped to the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention in Atlanta, scientists identified the virus. It took the name Ebola from a river near
Yambuku. And, having been discovered, it largely vanished for almost 20 years.
In 1995, it reemerged in Kikwit, about 500 miles to the southwest. The first victim was 35year-old Gaspard Menga, who worked in the surrounding forest raising crops and making
charcoal. In Kikongo, the predominant local dialect, his surname means “blood.” He checked
into Kikwit General Hospital in January and died from what doctors took to be shigellosis—a
diarrheal disease caused by bacteria. It was only in May, after the simmering outbreak had
flared into something disastrous, after wards had filled with screams and vomit, after graves
had filled with bodies, after Muyembe had arrived on the scene and again sent samples abroad
for testing, that everyone realized Ebola was back. By the time the epidemic abated, 317
people had been infected and 245 had died. The horrors of Kikwit, documented by foreign
journalists, catapulted Ebola into international infamy. Since then, Ebola has returned to the
Congo on six more occasions; the most recent outbreak, which began in Bikoro and
then spread to Mbandaka, a provincial capital, is still ongoing at the time of this writing.
Unlike airborne viruses such as influenza, Ebola spreads only through contact with infected
bodily fluids. Even so, it is capable of incredible devastation, as West Africa learned in 2014,
when, in the largest outbreak to date, more than 28,000 people were infected and upwards of
11,000 died. Despite the relative difficulty of transmission, Ebola still shut down health
systems, crushed economies, and fomented fear. With each outbreak, it reveals the
vulnerabilities in our infrastructure and our psyches that a more contagious pathogen might
one day exploit.
These include forgetfulness. In the 23 years since 1995, new generations who have never
experienced the horrors of Ebola have been born in Kikwit. Protective equipment to shield
doctors and nurses from contaminated blood has vanished, even as the virus has continued to
emerge in other corners of the country. The city’s population has tripled. New neighborhoods
have sprung up. In one of them, I walk through a market, gazing at delectable displays of
peppers, eggplants, avocados, and goat meat. Pieces of salted fish sell for 300 Congolese
francs—about the equivalent of an American quarter. Juicy white grubs go for 1,000. And the
biggest delicacy of all goes for 13,000—a roasted monkey, its charred face preserved in a
deathly grimace.
The monkey surprises me. Mikolo is surprised to see only one. Usually, he says, these stalls are
heaving with monkeys, bats, and other bushmeat, but rains the night before must have
stranded any hunters in the eastern forests. As I look around the market, I picture it as an
ecological magnet, drawing in all the varied animals that dwell within the forest—and all the
viruses that dwell within them.
3
The Congo is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. It was here that HIV
bubbled into a pandemic, eventually detected half a world away, in California. It was here that
monkeypox was first documented in people. The country has seen outbreaks of Marburg
virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, chikungunya virus, yellow fever. These are all
zoonotic diseases, which originate in animals and spill over into humans. Wherever people
push into wildlife-rich habitats, the potential for such spillover is high. Sub-Saharan Africa’s
population will more than double during the next three decades, and urban centers will extend
farther into wilderness, bringing large groups of immunologically naive people into contact
with the pathogens that skulk in animal reservoirs—Lassa fever from rats, monkeypox from
primates and rodents, Ebola from God-knows-what in who-knows-where.
On average, in one corner of the world or another, a new infectious disease has emerged
every year for the past 30 years: MERS , Nipah, Hendra, and many more. Researchers estimate
that birds and mammals harbor anywhere from 631,000 to 827,000 unknown viruses that
could potentially leap into humans. Valiant efforts are under way to identify them all, and scan
for them in places like poultry farms and bushmeat markets, where animals and people are
most likely to encounter each other. Still, we likely won’t ever be able to predict which will
spill over next; even long-known viruses like Zika, which was discovered in 1947, can
suddenly develop into unforeseen epidemics.
Read: How will the coronavirus end?
The Congo, ironically, has a good history of containing its diseases, partly because travel is so
challenging. Most of the country is covered by thick forest, crisscrossed by just 1,700 miles of
road. Large distances and poor travel infrastructure limited the spread of Ebola outbreaks in
years past.
But that is changing. A 340-mile road, flanked by deep valleys, connects Kikwit to Kinshasa.
In 1995, that road was so badly maintained that the journey took more than a week. “You’d
have to dig yourself out every couple of minutes,” Mikolo says. Now the road is beautifully
paved for most of its length, and can be traversed in just eight hours. Twelve million people
live in Kinshasa—three times the combined population of the capitals affected by the 2014
West African outbreak. About eight international flights depart daily from the city’s airport.
If Ebola hit Kikwit today, “it would arrive here easily,” Muyembe tells me in his office at the
National Institute for Biomedical Research, in Kinshasa. “Patients will leave Kikwit to seek
better treatment, and Kinshasa will be contaminated immediately. And then from here to
Belgium? Or the U.S.?” He laughs, morbidly.
“What can you do to stop that?,” I ask.
“Nothing.”
ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO , in 1918, a strain of H1N1 flu swept the world. It might have
originated in Haskell County, Kansas, or in France or China—but soon it was everywhere. In
4
two years, it killed as many as 100 million people—5 percent of the world’s population,1 and
far more than the number who died in World War I. It killed not just the very young, old, and
sick, but also the strong and fit, bringing them down through their own violent immune
responses. It killed so quickly that hospitals ran out of beds, cities ran out of coffins, and
coroners could not meet the demand for death certificates. It lowered Americans’ life
expectancy by more than a decade.1 “The flu resculpted human populations more radically
than anything since the Black Death,” Laura Spinney wrote in Pale Rider, her 2017 book about
the pandemic. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history—a potent reminder of
the threat posed by disease.
Humanity seems to need such reminders often. In 1948, shortly after the first flu vaccine was
created and penicillin became the first mass-produced antibiotic, U.S. Secretary of State
George Marshall reportedly claimed that the conquest of infectious disease was imminent. In
1962, after the second polio vaccine was formulated, the Nobel Prize–winning virologist Sir
Frank Macfarlane Burnet asserted, “To write about infectious diseases is almost to write of
something that has passed into history.”
Hindsight has not been kind to these proclamations. Despite advances in antibiotics and
vaccines, and the successful eradication of smallpox, Homo sapiens is still locked in the same
epic battle with viruses and other pathogens that we’ve been fighting since the beginning of
our history. When cities first arose, diseases laid them low, a process repeated over and over
for millennia. When Europeans colonized the Americas, smallpox followed. When soldiers
fought in the first global war, influenza hitched a ride, and found new opportunities in the
unprecedented scale of the conflict. Down through the centuries, diseases have always
excelled at exploiting flux.
Humanity is now in the midst of its fastest-ever period of change. There were almost 2 billion
people alive in 1918; there are now 7.6 billion, and they have migrated rapidly into cities,
which since 2008 have been home to more than half of all human beings. In these dense
throngs, pathogens can more easily spread and more quickly evolve resistance to drugs. Not
coincidentally, the total number of outbreaks per decade has more than tripled since the
1980s.
Globalization compounds the risk: Airplanes now carry almost 10 times as many passengers
around the world as they did four decades ago. In the ’80s, HIV showed how potent new
diseases can be, by launching a slow-moving pandemic that has since claimed about 35 million
lives. In 2003, another newly discovered virus, SARS , spread decidedly more quickly. A
Chinese seafood seller hospitalized in Guangzhou passed it to dozens of doctors and nurses,
one of whom traveled to Hong Kong for a wedding. In a single night, he infected at least 16
others, who then carried the virus to Canada, Singapore, and Vietnam. Within six
1
How about Covid-19?[O.E.]
5
months, SARS had reached 29 countries and infected more than 8,000 people. This is a new
epoch of disease, when geographic barriers disappear and threats that once would have been
local go global.
Last year, with the centennial of the 1918 flu looming, I started looking into whether America
is prepared for the next pandemic. I fully expected that the answer would be no. What I
found, after talking with dozens of experts, was more complicated—reassuring in some ways,
but even more worrying than I’d imagined in others. Certainly, medicine has advanced
considerably during the past century. The United States has nationwide vaccination programs,
advanced hospitals, the latest diagnostic tests. In the National Institutes of Health, it has the
world’s largest biomedical research establishment, and in the CDC, arguably the world’s
strongest public-health agency. America is as ready to face down new diseases as any country
in the world.
Jeremy Brown: The coronavirus is no 1918 pandemic
Yet even the U.S. is disturbingly vulnerable—and in some respects is becoming quickly more
so. It depends on a just-in-time medical economy, in which stockpiles are limited and even
key items are made to order. Most of the intravenous bags used in the country are
manufactured in Puerto Rico, so when Hurricane Maria devastated the island last September,
the bags fell in short supply. Some hospitals were forced to inject saline with syringes—and so
syringe supplies started running low too. The most common lifesaving drugs all depend on
long supply chains that include India and China—chains that would likely break in a severe
pandemic2. “Each year, the system gets leaner and leaner,” says Michael Osterholm, the
director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of
Minnesota. “It doesn’t take much of a hiccup anymore to challenge it.”
Perhaps most important, the U.S. is prone to the same forgetfulness and shortsightedness that
befall all nations, rich and poor—and the myopia has worsened considerably in recent years.
Public-health programs are low on money; hospitals are stretched perilously thin; crucial
funding is being slashed. And while we tend to think of science when we think of pandemic
response, the worse the situation, the more the defense depends on political leadership.
When Ebola flared in 2014, the science-minded President Barack Obama calmly and quickly
took the reins. The White House is now home to a president who is neither calm nor scienceminded. We should not underestimate what that may mean if risk becomes reality.
Bill Gates, whose foundation has studied pandemic risks closely, is not a man given to
alarmism. But when I spoke with him upon my return from Kikwit, he described
simulations showing that a severe flu pandemic, for instance, could kill more than 33 million
people worldwide in just 250 days3. That possibility, and the world’s continued inability to
adequately prepare for it, is one of the few things that shake Gates’s trademark optimism and
2
3
What happened to supply chains during the pandemic? [O.E.]
What happened in the first 250 days of Covid-19?
6
challenge his narrative of global progress. “This is a rare case of me being the bearer of bad
news,” he told me. “Boy, do we not have our act together.”
Preparing for a pandemic ultimately boils down to real people and tangible things: A busy
doctor who raises an eyebrow when a patient presents with an unfamiliar fever. A nurse who
takes a travel history. A hospital wing in which patients can be isolated. A warehouse where
protective masks are stockpiled. A factory that churns out vaccines. A line on a budget. A
vote in Congress. “It’s like a chain—one weak link and the whole thing falls apart,” says
Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “You
need no weak links.”
Read: Anthony Fauci’s plan to say honest
AMONG ALL KNOWN PANDEMIC THREATS , influenza is widely regarded as the most
dangerous. Its various strains are constantly changing, sometimes through subtle mutations in
their genes, and sometimes through dramatic reshuffles. Even in nonpandemic years, when
new viruses aren’t sweeping the world, the more familiar strains kill up to 500,000 people
around the globe. Their ever-changing nature explains why the flu vaccine needs to be
updated annually. It’s why a disease that is sometimes little worse than a bad cold can
transform into a mass-murdering monster. And it’s why flu is the disease the U.S. has invested
the most in tracking. An expansive surveillance network constantly scans for new flu viruses,
collating alerts raised by doctors and results from lab tests, and channeling it all to the CDC,
the spider at the center of a thrumming worldwide web.
Yet just 10 years ago, the virus that the world is most prepared for caught almost everyone off
guard. In the early 2000s, the CDC was focused mostly on Asia, where H5N1—the type of flu
deemed most likely to cause the next pandemic—was running wild among poultry and
waterfowl. But while experts fretted about H5N1 in birds in the East, new strains of H1N1
were evolving within pigs in the West. One of those swine strains jumped into humans in
Mexico, launching outbreaks there and in the U.S. in early 2009. The surveillance web picked
it up only in mid-April of that year, when the CDC tested samples from two California
children who had recently fallen ill.
One of the most sophisticated disease-detecting networks in the world had been blindsided by
a virus that had sprung up in its backyard, circulated for months, and snuck into the country
unnoticed. “We joked that the influenza virus is listening in on our conference calls,” says
Daniel Jernigan, who directs the CDC’s Influenza Division. “It tends to do whatever we’re
least expecting.”
The pandemic caused problems for vaccine manufacturers, too. Most flu vaccines are made
by growing viruses in chicken eggs—the same archaic method that’s been used for 70 years.
Every strain grows differently, so manufacturers must constantly adjust to each new
peculiarity. Creating flu vaccines is an artisanal affair, more like cultivating a crop than making
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a pharmaceutical. The process works reasonably well for seasonal flu, which arrives on a
predictable schedule. It fails miserably for pandemic strains, which do not.
In 2009, the vaccine for the new pandemic strain of H1N1 flu arrived slowly. (Then–CDC
Director Tom Frieden told the press, “Even if you yell at the eggs, it won’t grow any faster.”)
Once the pandemic was officially declared, it took four months before the doses even began to
roll out in earnest. By then the disaster was already near its peak. Those doses prevented no
more than 500 deaths—the fewest of any flu season in the surrounding 10-year period. Some
12,500 Americans died.
The egg-based system depends on chickens, which are themselves vulnerable to flu. And since
viruses can mutate within the eggs, the resulting vaccines don’t always match the strains that
are circulating. But vaccine makers have few incentives to use anything else. Switching to a
different process would cost billions, and why bother? Flu vaccines are low-margin products,
which only about 45 percent of Americans get in a normal year. So when demand soars
during a pandemic, the supply is not set to cope.
American hospitals, which often operate unnervingly close to full capacity, likewise struggled
with the surge of patients. Pediatric units were hit especially hard by H1N1, and staff became
exhausted from continuously caring for sick children. Hospitals almost ran out of the lifesupport units that sustain people whose lungs and hearts start to fail. The health-care system
didn’t break, but it came too close for comfort—especially for what turned out to be a
training-wheels pandemic. The 2009 H1N1 strain killed merely 0.03 percent of those it
infected; by contrast, the 1918 strain had killed 1 to 3 percent, and the H7N9 strain currently
circulating in China has a fatality rate of 40 percent.4
A lot of people said that we dodged a bullet in 2009, but nature just shot us with a BB gun,”
says Richard Hatchett, the CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
Tom Inglesby, a biosecurity expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
told me that if a 1918-style pandemic hit, his hospital “would need in the realm of seven times
as many critical-care beds and four times as many ventilators as we have on hand.”
That the U.S. could be so ill-prepared for flu, of all things, should be deeply concerning. The
country has a dedicated surveillance web, antiviral drugs, and an infrastructure for making and
deploying flu vaccines. None of that exists for the majority of other emerging infectious
diseases.
AS I WALK DOWN a seventh-floor hallway of the University of Nebraska Medical Center,
Kate Boulter, a nurse manager, points out that the carpet beneath my feet has disappeared,
exposing bare floors that are more easily cleaned. In an otherwise unmarked corridor, this, she
says, is the first sign that I am approaching the biocontainment unit—a special facility
4
What about Covid-19? [O.E.]
8
designed to treat the victims of bioterror attacks, or patients with a deadly infectious disease
such as Ebola or SARS .
There is nothing obviously special about the 4,100 square feet, but every detail has been
carefully designed to give patients maximal access to the best care, and viruses minimal access
to anything. A supply room is stocked with scrubs, underwear, and socks, so that no piece of
clothing staff members wear at work will make its way home. There are two large
autoclaves—pressure cookers that use steam to sterilize equipment—so that soiled linens and
clothes can be immediately decontaminated. The space is under negative air pressure: When
doctors enter the hallway, or any of the five patient rooms, air flows in with them, preventing
viruses from drifting out. This also dries the air. Working here, I’m told, is murder on the
skin.
Almost everything in the unit is a barrier of some form. Floor seams are welded. Light and
plumbing fixtures are sealed. The ventilation and air-conditioning systems are separate from
those for the rest of the hospital, and rigorously filtered. Patients can be wheeled in on a
tented gurney with built-in glove ports; it looks like a translucent caterpillar whose legs have
been pushed inward. A separate storage room is stocked with full-body suits, tape for sealing
the edges of gloves, and space-suit-like hoods with their own air filter. A videoconferencing
system allows team members—and family—to monitor what happens in the patient rooms
without having to suit up themselves. A roll of heavy-duty metallic wrapping paper can be
used to seal the body of anyone who dies.
The unit is currently empty, as it has been for most of its existence. The beds are occupied
only by four hyperrealistic mannequins, upon which nurses can practice medical procedures
while wearing cumbersome protective layers. “We’ve named all the mannequins,” Boulter tells
me. Pointing to the largest one: “That one’s Phil, after Dr. Smith.”
Phil Smith began pushing the hospital to build the biocontainment unit in 2003, back when he
was a professor of infectious diseases. SARS had emerged from nowhere, and monkeypox had
broken out in the Midwest; Smith realized the U.S. had no facilities that could handle such
diseases, beyond a few high-security research labs. With support from the state health
department, he opened the unit in 2005.
And then, nothing happened.
For nine years, the facility was dormant, acting mostly as an overflow ward. “We didn’t know
if it would be needed, but we planned and prepared as if it would,” says Shelly Schwedhelm,
the head of the hospital’s emergency-preparedness program, who for years kept the unit afloat
on a shoestring budget. Her efforts paid off in September 2014, when the State Department
called, telling Schwedhelm and her team to prepare for possible Ebola patients. Over 10
weeks, the unit’s 40 staff members took care of three infected Americans who had been
evacuated from West Africa. They worked around the clock in teams of six, some staffers
treating the patients directly, others helping their colleagues put on and take off their gear, and
9
still others supervising from the nurses’ station. Two of the patients—Rick Sacra, a physician,
and Ashoka Mukpo, a journalist—were cured and discharged. The third—a surgeon named
Martin Salia—was already suffering from organ failure by the time he arrived, and died two
days later. A green-marble plaque now hangs in the unit to honor him.
The University of Nebraska Medical Center is one of the best in the country at handling
dangerous and unusual diseases, Ron Klain, who was in charge of the Obama administration’s
Ebola response, tells me. Only the NIH and Emory University Hospital have biocontainment
units of a similar standard, he says, but both are smaller. Those three hospitals were the only
ones ready to take patients when Ebola struck in 2014, but within two months, Klain’s team
had raised the number to 50 facilities. It was “a lot of hard work,” he says. “But ultimately, we
had 144 beds.” A more contagious and widespread disease would have overwhelmed them all.
Preparing hospitals for new epidemics is challenging in the United States, Klain says, because
health care is so decentralized: “You and I could decide that every hospital should have three
beds capable of isolating people with a dangerous disease, and Trump could agree with us,
and there’s no way of making that happen.” Hospitals are independent entities; in this
fractured environment, preparedness is less the result of governmental mandate and more the
product of individual will. It comes from dedicated visionaries like Smith and skilled managers
like Schwedhelm, who can keep things going when there’s no immediate need.
The trio of Ebola patients in 2014 produced 3,700 pounds of contaminated linens, gloves, and
other waste among them, all of which demanded careful handling. Treating them cost more
than $1 million. That kind of care quickly reaches its limits as an epidemic spreads. In June
2015, the Samsung Medical Center, in Seoul—one of the most advanced medical centers in
the world—was forced to suspend most of its services after a single man with MERS arrived in
its overcrowded emergency room. American hospitals wouldn’t fare much better. But at the
very least, they can plan for the worst.
Schwedhelm, with a 100-person team, has been creating plans for how every aspect of
hospital operation would need to work during a pandemic. How much should hospitals
stockpile? How would they provide psychological support during a weeks-long crisis? How
could they feed people working longer-than-usual shifts? When would they cancel elective
surgeries? Where could they get extra disinfectant, mop heads, and other cleaning supplies?
At a single meeting, I hear two dozen people discuss how they would care for the 400 or so
patients on the hospital’s organ-transplant list. How would they get such patients into the
facility safely? At what point would it become too risky to pump them with
immunosuppressants? If ICUs are full, where could they create clean spaces for posttransplant recovery? It matters that the hospital has considered these questions. It matters just
as much that the people in charge have met, talked, and established a bond.
The members of the team running the biocontainment unit all work in different parts of the
hospital, as pediatricians, critical-care specialists, obstetricians. But even during the unit’s long
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dormancy, Schwedhelm would gather them for quarterly training sessions. That’s why, when
the moment came, they were ready. When they escorted the Ebola patients off their
respective planes, the staff members recalled what they had learned during practice drills.
“We do a lot of team building,” Boulter says, showing me a photo of the group at a ropes
course.
“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” Schwedhelm says. They followed that up with
something more sedate—a movie night in the hospital auditorium. They watched Contagion.
KIKWIT
GENERAL HOSPITAL
has no biocontainment unit. Instead, it has Pavilion 3.
Emery Mikolo, who works at the hospital as a nurse supervisor, takes me into the blue-walled,
open-windowed building that is now the pediatrics ward. In one room, mosquito nets are
suspended hammocklike over 16 closely packed beds, on which mothers care for young
children and newborn babies. This is a place of new life. But in 1995, it was the infamous
“death ward,” where Ebola patients were treated. Exhausted doctors struggled to control the
outbreak; outside the hospital, the military established a perimeter to turn back fleeing
patients. The dead were laid in a row on the pavement.
We walk into another room, which is largely empty except for a poster of a cartoonish giraffe,
a few worn mattresses, and some old bed frames. Mikolo touches one of them. It was his, he
says. He looks around quietly and sh