Please cancel your holiday plans, urge doctors as Coronavirus cases shoot up

As the Coronavirus cases continue to shoot up across America, doctors are pleading with people to cancel their holiday plans to help protect their loved ones and control the spread of the virus. America has been left reeling following the sharp rise in cases that followed Halloween and Thanksgiving. With Christmas in sight and New Year's looming large, the country could be in for a torrid few months as cases are likely to shoot up more than ever. Hospitals are bursting at the seams with patients and healthcare workers are running themselves into the ground as they help fight this dangerous disease that people don't seem to take seriously enough. America alone has reported 18 million Coronavirus cases in the past year with more than 325,000 people succumbing to Coronavirus.

Dipti S Barot, a primary care doctor in the San Francisco Bay Area, pleaded with people to cancel their year-end holiday plans in an article for The Huffington Post. "It is not too late to cancel your Christmas plans. Your holiday hangouts. Your annual end-of-the-year, multifamily, multigenerational bonanzas," wrote Barot. "I can’t count how many patients needed me to give them an out so they could skip the wedding, the funeral, the Thanksgiving gathering. They knew better but didn’t know how to do better. One person dies every half a minute in our country right now. We are running out of intensive care unit beds in California. The state has ordered 5,000 body bags and 60 morgue trucks to deal with the COVID-19 dead there. This is not a drill," stressed Dr. Dipti Barot. 

The UK canceled their elaborate holiday plans, limiting it to just Christmas day after learning that a new strain of the virus had started spreading. Governments, primarily those led by conservative leaders, have been hesitant to 'cancel' festivals in the fear of damaging their image. Just three days prior to announcing the UK would have to put on hold its holiday plans, the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had mocked the opposition leader for suggesting the same, reported MSN News. Boris Johnson goaded Labour's Keir Starmer until he was forced to cancel the plans. In America, neither Trump nor any member of his administration has advised people to cancel their holiday plans and not meet up for Christmas or New Year. 

Dr. Dipti Barot warns that many are not considering the gravity of the consequences when they go ahead with their holiday plans. "You can have COVID-19 and not know it. And if you breathe, you can spread it. It is that simple. I promise you have not been careful enough that you are not a risk to your loved ones. Unfortunately, you are not exceptional. When it comes to COVID-19, none of us are," wrote Dr. Barot. They also warned that the healthcare system was struggling to keep up with the rising number of patients. "If you contract the virus, there will be no guaranteed bed for you, no teams of doctors lining up to administer monoclonal antibody treatments."

Dr. Barot isn't the only one though. Doctors across the country are pleading with people to stay home this holiday season. "People are traveling. They are gathering. They're getting fed up," said Seema Yasmin, who served as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the US Centers for Disease Control, reported MSN News. "Then we're hearing these really heartbreaking stories of people on their ICU beds on their death bed saying, 'Oh, I wish I'd stuck out the restrictions a bit more. Tell people to take this seriously.' So please don't do it. It's not worth it." Dr. Barot pleaded: "Please stay home. Every day now, the death toll is worse than 9/11, and we are approaching a half-million dead. Please do not gather indoors with family and friends, and for the love of whomever or whatever you love, please don’t take those masks off." As the leaders in the government had failed its people, Dr. Barot urged individuals to take responsibility for themselves and their families. 

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