The earliest cases of the novel coronavirus seem to have been in Hubei Province, in the city of Wuhan in China, possibly in November of 2019. The virus shares a family name with other more common viruses that are known to cause upper respiratory infections, such as the common cold. I won't go into Covid's origins, other than to say that there has been lots of obfuscation about them and I look forward to seeing the original streaming video series of the pandemic in about 5 years when perhaps the truth will be accepted fact. I first heard about this new virus before I went to South Sudan for the last time in early 2020. I wasn't worried. There had been flu pandemics in my lifetime and we had muddled through. How bad could it be? People were starting to wear masks in the airport, which I thought was silly. As it spread to western Washington state, it looked like it might be more serious than I had predicted. Then it got awful in Europe, then finally the US became a disaster of...
The cost of health care in the US is higher than anywhere else in the world, and yet we are not healthier than our peer nations. In fact, in terms of such measures as infant mortality and life span, we don't measure up. Why is this? Many people involved in providing or receiving care have some pretty good ideas about what costs so much, and what we can do to reduce costs and improve quality. Sharing these stories is an important step in creating affordable universal health care.