Member-only story
Have Our Top Hospitals and Universities Learned Their Lesson?
Academic medical centers in the U.S. didn’t do enough to combat Ebola in West Africa — that cost us when Covid hit.
I only vaguely remember the frenzied activity as they rushed me from the ambulance to the isolation ward. But I vividly recall the nurse trying to start an intravenous line in my left arm. I watched as she missed three times, hitting a nerve on her last attempt.
Later I learned the nurse had worked in the intensive care unit for over 20 years. And she was part of the team that hours before my arrival ran a drill simulating care for a mock Ebola patient. By any measure, she was the most qualified person to start my IV. Yet she repeatedly failed.
She learned — just as I had a few weeks earlier —that drilling and practice get you only so far when dealing with a deadly infectious disease in real life.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, academic medical centers (hospitals affiliated with medical and public health schools) have played a critical role in the U.S. But they were also woefully underprepared for it.
Some of the reasons for this were obvious — a shortage of protective equipment, chronic underfunding of public health, and the ‘corporatization’ of…
