THE DESANTIS FLU:

In Cullman, Ala., Ray DeMonia was having a cardiac emergency and sought treatment at his local hospital, but he was not admitted because there was no ICU bed available. The local hospital contacted 43 other hospitals in three states, and all were filled beyond capacity. He was eventually transferred to a hospital in Mississippi about 200 miles away, but it was too late to save his life.

In Bellville, Texas, Daniel Wilkinson was diagnosed in his local emergency room with gallstone pancreatitis. He needed immediate surgery, but the hospital was not equipped to perform the procedure. His emergency room physician tried for seven hours to locate another hospital where the surgery could be performed. Finally, a bed became available at the VA hospital in Houston, but by the time he was airlifted to the hospital, it was too late to perform the surgery and he died.

In Alaska, as well as other states with high levels of Covid-19 cases, "crisis standards of care" have been implemented to allocate scarce resources in a state where vast distances between hospitals often makes it infeasible to transfer patients in a medical emergency. Medical staff members were forced to decide which patients got life-saving dialysis, the use of a ventilator or an ICU bed.

The pandemic has killed over 700,000 Americans, but it has indirectly killed many more -- all the people with treatable health emergencies who were

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