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by mrob 2296 days ago
>where are you going to educated and train doctors and nurses to manage 3X

I suggest introducing a medical equivalent of military reserve forces/organized militias. These would be volunteers who train several times a year with medical professionals, to be called up in emergencies. Training would be limited to the skills most important in a pandemic. To incentivize volunteering, they could be given priority for medical treatment when resources are limited.

2 comments

Even so, if those volunteers who are going to be performing dangerous and invasive (but potentially life-saving) procedures (like intubating people) and making snap life-or-death decisions (that require aptitude + years of medical education + experience, to avoid inadvertently killing their patients), we're going to need to have a very different set of expectations about these emergency volunteer medics/nurses than we would have for professional medics/nurses. With respect to death rates, expertise, errors, negligence, professional standards, how they will respond psychologically to the work. They would probably be better than nothing, but I imagine that an average person would rather have professional treating them than a volunteer, so that would be something that we would have to work through as a society.
That’s a really great idea!