If A Foreign Power Conspired To Kill As Many Of Us As Possible...

Horror stories emerge as unvaccinated patients crush Montana hospitals -- and threats 'have required a police response'https://t.co/kFmGEqqnlQ

— Raw Story (@RawStory) September 22, 2021

...without declaring war, without firing a shot: would it look any different than this?

The hospital’s morgue cart arrived at the ICU — as it frequently has these days — then the room was sterilized, another patient took the man’s place, and the cycle began again. In the past week, 14 people have died of covid here, the state’s largest hospital.

“I do feel a little hopeless,” said Christy Baxter, the hospital’s director of critical care.

The situation has played out in hospitals around the nation since 2020. But now Montana is a national hot spot for covid infections, recording the highest percentage increase in new cases over the past seven days. The state announced 1,209 new cases on Friday, and Yellowstone County, home to Billings Clinic, is seeing the worst of it. Last week, the county had 2,329 active cases, more than the next two counties combined.

What’s different from the early scenes of the pandemic is the public’s response. Not so long ago, the cheers of community support could be heard from the hospital parking lot. Now, tensions are so strained that Billings Clinic is printing signs for its hallways, asking that the staff members not be mistreated.

The ICU here has space for 28 patients but last Friday was operating at 160% capacity, Baxter said. To handle the overflow, nurses elsewhere provide care beyond their training as covid patients fill other parts of the hospital. In the lobby of the emergency department, rooms roughly 6 feet by 6 feet have been fashioned with makeshift plastic walls. Ten members of the Montana Army National Guard arrived last week to help however they can. Hospital staffers volunteer to sit with dying patients. Beds line hallways.

“The problem is,” said Brad Von Bergen, the hospital’s ER manager, “we are running out of hallways.”

The hospital announced it may soon implement “crisis standards of care,” which basically means it will ration its equipment, staff and medicine, giving preference to those it can most likely save, regardless of vaccination status. It’s an ugly system, abhorred by those who will wield it, with tiebreakers in place to decide who potentially lives and dies. Other hospitals in Montana have taken similar steps.

An overcrowded hospital also means that a person ― say, one injured in a car crash in rural eastern Montana and needing advanced hospitalization ― won’t be able to get that care at Billings Clinic.

“We are at the point where we are not confident going forward that we can continue to meet all patients’ needs,” said Dr. Nathan Allen, the medical ethicist for Billings Clinic and its department chair for emergency medicine. “And that’s heartbreaking.”

....

Dr. Sara Nyquist, an emergency medicine physician, said she has been asked by a patient if she is a Republican or a Democrat.

“I said, ‘I am your doctor,’” she recalled. “You do wonder how we got here.”

We don't need a foreign power to do this to us.  We did it to ourselves.  Freedumb:

Also on Tuesday, Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte announced that he was doubling the number of National Guard troops deployed to the hospital. He also announced deployments to hospitals in Bozeman, Butte, Helena and St. Vincent, the other hospital in Billings. He also deployed troops to Missoula county.

Under Gianforte and the GOP legislature, Montana is the only state to ban vaccine mandates for employees.

The irony is we always imagine some natural disaster, some monstrous calamity, will undo our civility and turn us all into monsters and make a mockery of self-government.  Rod Serling imagined it at least twice, most famously in "The Monsters are Coming to Maple Street," but also in "The Shelter."   But that kind of energy has never been unleashed by immediate circumstances, by a passing fear.  The reality is that we aren't so easily undone; but the reality is, also, that we are our own worst enemy, and our civility and capacity for self-governance can be undone.

And we're seeing that right now.  Montana is simply our Maple Street, or the friends fighting frantically to get into the bomb shelter.  But it's not one case for a TV show; it's the national reality.  A foreign power has not broken us; it’s taken a year, but we are breaking ourselves.

There is a lesson there, one connected to the comments here. I’d even take a lesson from Auden: “We must love one another, or die.”