 I feel like every day I hear another story about another doctor, young doctor, physician in their 40s or 50s who's admitted to the hospital with COVID-19 positive, despite the protective measures they're taking, admitted to the ICU, and even there's been deaths, all right? There's deaths of young people. And I feel like disproportionately it happens to be physicians, cardiologists, ICU doctors, et cetera, who are the ones out on the front lines. What is going on here? So I'm sure you have heard from various news stories about healthcare workers across the United States that are pleading for protection, for protection for ourselves while we're out there taking care of this disease, COVID-19, from the SARS-CoV-2 virus out on the front lines. Why? Because a lot of us don't really feel we're adequately protected. Now, the problem is nobody really understands everything about this virus. It's a novel virus, right? So it's new and it's aggressive. It's caused a pandemic super fast across the world. So anybody who thinks they know exactly how to prevent the transmission of this is incorrect because the reality is we don't know. Even the CDC website is vague in the absolute ways on how to practice PPE or personal protective equipment. That's the mask and the gowns that we wear. When to use these N95 respirator masks which block those airborne particles from being inhaled, okay? We know that this coronavirus, COVID-19, can be airborne in certain situations but do we know exactly when, how and always? My argument is we don't. Now in the United States there's a lot of different avenues hospitals have taken in terms of what their policies are for protecting healthcare workers. So there's sort of two different camps at this point. Recently a lot of hospitals have now mandated that anybody who walks into the hospital whether you're a healthcare worker or a patient you have to wear a surgical mask to protect yourself. Which is wise. I mean, why not play it safe? Better safe than sorry, right? Look what's going on in Italy, all right? This is a way that we can prevent people from inadvertently touching their face after the touch the surface that may be infected from maybe acquiring a droplet or transmitting droplets and it is probably the safest way to practice at this point in time with the information that we have in my opinion. These same hospitals, some of them at least are also saying that COVID-19 positive rooms you should be wearing an N95 respirator mask. Even though this virus is thought to be primarily a droplet transmitting disease, like I said, we don't know 100% when this thing becomes airborne. We think we can predict that such as intubation cases and aerosolized procedures, but I don't think we know for sure. Now there's some hospitals that are saying that nobody's allowed to wear a mask, a surgical mask when you're walking around the hospital. That's a little crazy, isn't it? To the point if you're wearing a surgical mask walking around the hospital some of these institutions will reprimand you. They will write you up, they will ask you to go home and some cases even fire you. That's ludicrous. They're just trying to protect themselves as healthcare personnel in this arena of uncertainty and fear. And now they're being reprimanded for that. Why? Because most of the comments I get on my Instagram is because the administration fears that it's gonna make patients and visitors worried and scared. It's gonna make the virus look worse than it really is. Guess what? It is that bad. And it's going to cause anxiety to other people not wearing masks. I mean, look what happens during the flu season, right? In the flu season, if you don't get a flu vaccine for one reason or another maybe you're allergic or whatever, you have to wear a mask, all right? They're mandating you to wear a mask. In this situation, this COVID-19 virus which is way worse than the flu, more contagious, they're saying you cannot wear a mask. Does that make any sense to anybody? Cause it doesn't make sense to me. Let's take a quick look what happened abroad. Look at China. In China, in Wuhan, China where this thing broke out, initially up to 40% of these infections were hospital acquired, almost all of them to healthcare personnel. Doctors, nurses and people who work in the hospital. And this is after they've been practicing droplet precautions, right? Droplet precautions again means regular surgical masks, gloves, gown, et cetera, and the proper, you know, sequence and technique. Now, after they brought in the outside physicians, they put everybody into these hazmat suits and PAPR hoods. These PAPR hoods are the ones you see with the plastic shield and the full-on hood to protect themselves from anything airborne, droplet, et cetera. After that, there was zero, zero hospital acquired infections. Let's take a look at Singapore. And this was discussed by Atul Gawande in his New Yorker article. If you haven't seen that, I highly recommend you read it. I'll link it below. And in Singapore, they flat their curve really quick and they had zero, almost zero to my understanding, hospital acquired infections by healthcare workers. What do they do? Well, aside from aggressive hand washing, cleaning all the surfaces with disinfecting in between every encounter, they utilize surgical masks for every encounter and while they're in the hospital, all right? And every COVID-19 positive or suspected patient they utilize in N95, all right? So they were aggressive and they got the job done. In addition to all the social distancing that we're also doing here. So why can't we follow the lead from what we're seeing over there, over here? And now we have healthcare workers being told you can't even wear a surgical mask. You can't use your own N95 when you go into COVID-19 room because that's what the hospital suits are saying. Whereas we're seeing what's going on in China, the experts of this, wearing these full-papper hoods. I don't understand it. Again, we're just trying to keep ourselves protected so we can take care of these patients. My stance is we got to keep ourselves protected. I understand there's a shortage, a shortage of N95s, but again, we can reuse these up to five times. And frankly, I'd rather use an N95 a six-time with a surgical mask on top of it rather than risk myself from an infection by downgrading my mask if I think the risk is there. So again, this is my personal opinion. I obviously nobody really knows what they're doing because the policies for hospitals are all around the map from one end to the complete opposite end. The CDC, I don't think knows what they're doing either. So why not keep ourselves as protected as possible? Because I don't want more 40-year-old doctors, 50-year-old doctors getting a minute to mimic you, even dying because they weren't adequately protected because we don't understand this enough. So please, if you are a hospital, a hospital administrator out there, think about your staff, your doctors, your nurses, keep them protected. Because we're the ones who are trying to protect everybody else.