Before we crash

Imagine you pass out and wake up in a car. You know it’s a car because the interior is similar to cars you’ve been in before.

You are in the driver’s seat, on a highway, the highway seems to be emptied of cars. You are going 170km/h. That means that if you hit something, you’re not going to survive.

The car doesn’t have seat belts, it doesn’t have pedals, or a shift-stick, it doesn’t even have a steering wheel.

You have an iPad sized display, but the controls are in a language you barely understand. You can make out a word or two, but you can’t figure out the menus or controls. You start pressing every button, but you note that pressing them randomly makes the car go faster. You need to press the right ones. (Just like trial and error with medication)

You start looking for breaks in all the places you know a break-system should be. You start touching the place where the steering wheel should be, perhaps there’s a touchscreen there?

You contemplate jumping out, but the road is rough, the speed to high, you will not make it.

You fear incoming traffic, and which terrain you will meet along the way. You have never seen this road before, and you don’t know how long you can keep going before you crash into something, or someone.

You can’t make a turn.

Soon enough, you see other people stuck in speeding cars in the lane next to you, they too are frantically searching strategies. Some have figured out how to open the window and signal knowledge they have gained, others are just laying back hoping that it’s a self-driving car (it isn’t).

So there you are, you know you’re in a car, you know you’ll die if you crash, and everything else, you’re just trying to figure out along the way.

This is what the novel coronavirus has been like for health care, researchers and policy makers.

We knew roughly what we were dealing with, but everything else had to be figured out while we fear for our lives, the lives of our patients, and colleagues.

Currently we have found a way to steer, but not stop or control the speed. We need breaks (a vaccine) before we know we can safely get off this hellish road.