Washington is not focusing singularly on this virus as the enemy. COVID-19, SARS-2 Coronavirus should be a unifying factor for our country. Our political leadership is not seeing this tragic pandemic as a way to help us move our public health response more efficiently and quickly to accelerate our efforts to provide economic relief to all of those who need it.

Instead of working together for us, they are working overtime on tactics to divide Americans even more. Democrats are being portrayed as evil pessimists while Republicans are being identified as anti-virus militants, the liberators of our depressed economy.

Under the “Are you kidding me?” category: According to the AP, more than 70 people tested positive for coronavirus since the April 24 rally at the Wisconsin state capital. Michigan is working on legislation that may limit the carrying of AR-15s inside the State Capitol building.

Also in Michigan, a security guard was shot and killed by a family for attempting to enforce the “you must wear a mask policy” before entering an open establishment.

Several weeks ago, a lawsuit that may or may not go anywhere was filed against Fox News for violating the Washington State Consumer Protection Act because their national celebrity broadcasters falsely stated multiple times that the coronavirus is a hoax. At the same time, even though we all know the virus can be deadly 14,000 heroes have signed up to be voluntarily infected to assist in vaccine studies to help expedite the creation of a vaccine.

What do we know about this disease? Obviously, not as much as we don’t know.

Physicians in London, New York and elsewhere have reportedly seen an increase in children suffering from symptoms emulating Kawasaki disease with inflamed hearts. They have also identified numerous other unusual symptoms including the weakening of the heart muscles and disrupting its critical rhythm.

COVID-19 attacks kidneys so seriously that now, instead of a shortage of ventilators, we are seeing a need for more dialysis equipment. Besides the attacks to our nervous system that destroys taste and smell, the disease sometimes makes its way to the brain. If that’s not enough, 20 to 45-year-olds are suffering 50 percent higher than average numbers of strokes or are dying from blood clots due to inflamed blood vessels.

According to an article by Lenny Bernstein and Ariana Eunjung Cha, “It can begin with a few symptoms or none at all, then days later, squeeze the air out of the lungs without warning.

It picks on the elderly, people weakened by previous disease, and, disproportionately, the obese. It harms men more than women, but there are also signs it complicates pregnancies.”

We also have seen articles like this in the CDC where “the effects of COVID-19 suggests a disproportionate burden of illness and death among racial and ethnic minority groups.”

Throughout this, however, our president is continuing his battle against the Democratic governors by saying they are holding their citizens hostage while at the very same time due to an outbreak of COVID-19 in the West Wing of the White House, three of America’s top health professionals are quarantined in their homes.

So, we have to ask: What’s at stake here? Manufactured political divisions are now impacting aid for states as well. This is not a red or blue discussion. The opponent here is not us individually, not members of any party. The victims are members of the human race caused by the real enemy, COVID-19.

No one wants the economy to remain closed. Governors on both sides are attempting to balance the death-over-money equation, but the necessary arrows for the COVID quiver have been slow to arrive, and the needed instruction and supplies from the federal government have become an economic stand-off.

We all want freedom from our enemy. Stop the politicizing, and stop feeding these political war games, or we’ll die.

Things are gonna change after COVID

According to the medical examiners, the primary underlying conditions leading to death in the victims of this pandemic are hypertension and diabetes, chronic conditions brought on by environment and diet.

The fact that COVID is disproportionately impacting marginated communities should not be a surprise to anyone. A healthy public depends upon diet through fresh, healthy foods which are more expensive and in “Urban Food Deserts” almost impossible to find or afford. Plus, health is also related to the environment (think Flynt, Michigan), and sustainable employment.

We have produced so much vulnerability in the U.S. through our current circumstances that analyzing this disaster without properly taking into consideration our pre-existing health care crisis is, in itself, a crisis. Would we scrutinize this differently if we looked at our current system more holistically?

We have huge disparities in both our healthcare system and our public health system. We have been preparing for another pandemic since 1918, yet we were woefully unprepared for even the most basics of PPE, available ventilators, and ICU beds.

In an article titled “Disasters, Capitalism, and COVID-19” by Vincennes Adams, Naomi Klein describes disaster capitalism as a form of economics that responds to disasters in ways that promote “free-market, for-profit, corporate solutions.” She says, “It may succeed in creating company profits but ultimately fails in terms of democracy, fairness, and justice.”

She describes the Hurricane Katrina disaster as being caused, in part, by the privatization of the Army Corps of Engineers and the oil industry’s erosion of protective wetlands. The highest death tolls, financial, and material losses affected the most vulnerable social and economic groups. During the recovery, private sector contractors rewarded themselves richly while ordinary people were left to make it on their own.

I’m watching this same phenomenon unfold today with Community Health Centers across Pennsylvania as they try to get the needed Personal Protection Equipment. Wealthier health systems, States, and the Federal Government can buy the large quantities required to meet the corporate criteria for these purchases while the marginalized become further marginalized.

Why aren’t the flu, viral colds, heart disease, cancer and diabetes deaths considered disasters? It’s because of the immediacy of death with COVID. The author suggests: “Imagine how U.S. health care institutions and government responses might change if cancer, heart disease, and diabetes were framed in the same language and sense of urgency as COVID-19.”

According to the author, It’s because these diseases are “an outcome of allowing corporations to sell deadly, heart-disease producing foods and barely regulating cancer-causing chemicals at all.” This country has always had a very hard time determining the differences between the value of corporate profits vs.human life.

The article references a “pandemic industrial complex,” which, like the military industrial complex uses the disaster to form a framework in which government and financial resources are mobilized to leverage free market investing in the next big outbreak.

Global warming has contributed to fires, floods, hurricanes, and now unique viral mutations. The new prognosticators of these disasters are computational and zoonosis biologists, epidemiologists and geneticists.

What they have been able to point out to us is not necessarily the coming disasters as much as the pre-existing vulnerabilities, and they’ve been able to do it in ways that also predict capitalistic disaster as well.

If our population were more health conscious, had better access to health insurance, and was less influenced by the free capitalism that continuously promotes products that are detrimental to our health, a disaster already created by a capitalist free market, would this be a different set of analytics?

Is COVID-19 the disaster, or is our real United States disaster the lack of a functioning health care safety-net for our most vulnerable? The primary question we should be considering is: can we change that future for our kids and grandkids? Wuhan, China reopened today after 10 weeks, but nothing is the same.

This is getting serious

What do mountain goats, woodpeckers, and football players all have in common? Head butts. Why is it that a woodpecker can pound his head millions of times and not suffer from debilitating brain injuries, and while, we’re at it, what about rams? Heck, even their name identifies what they do.

There have been numerous studies of woodpeckers to attempt to determine what the differentiator is relative to brain injuries and their natural assignment of beating holes in trees with their beaks. These beaks, if you haven’t noticed, are attached to their heads which is where their tiny little brains hang out.

Woodpeckers have to peck pretty hard to get the bugs and insects they’re after. It was originally believed they had a special bone-like, foam material between their brain and their skull, but after dissecting a few deceased woodpeckers, according to MIT professor, Lorna Gibson, it was clear they did not have any foam lining. She and several other scientists dug in and found woodpecker facts.

The woodpecker is absolutely the headbanger of the bird world. They also peck to profess their love and to layout their territory. Their pecking speed would absolutely produce a concussion for a human. They bang their beak at 15 mph between 700 and 12,000 times a day, at up to 20 times per second. That, my friends, is a lot of pecking.

They have thick, strong neck muscles which contract just before their bill hits the surface. This allows some of the force to dissipate down through the bird’s body which protects the bird’s skull from the full blow. They also have unequal upper and lower beaks which lowers the force of the peck from hitting the brain.

Another shock absorber is their tongue. Woodpeckers have tongue supports that wrap around their brains, and work as a safety harness. Plus their brain weighs only two grams and is tightly fit in the skull.

That configuration keeps the brain from banging around inside the skull. Because their tails help brace them against the tree and their toes also are built to brace them, you can say they’ve found the proper pecking posture.

In spite of all the protections Mother Nature provides for them, woodpeckers do get brain damage, but they also have an accumulation of a protein called tau which actually protects them from suffering from neurodegenerative diseases like the chronic traumatic encephalopathy that our football players get.

Because of these studies, all kinds of technological and safety advances have been implemented in sports equipment, but it is believed that the presence of tau in woodpeckers is a protective adaptation, because in moderation, it works to stabilize brains cells.

Tau is typically found in human patients with brain diseases ranging from Alzheimer’s to traumatic head injuries. Consequently, it is now up to scientists to discover why tau is good for woodpeckers and how that protein can be adapted to protect football players and others from brain injuries.

Rams, on the other hand, typically bash their heads together at a speed ranging from 20 to 40 mph without injury. How do they do it? Rams have strong, flexible horns that absorb much of the shock of the collisions, in addition to a physical anomaly that slows the blood flow from the head to the body.

Scientists studying football players in Colorado discovered that football players at higher altitudes had 30% fewer head injuries. Their hypothesis is that higher altitudes increase the volume of fluid in the cerebral venous system which provides another layer of protection.

So, maybe the solution is to equip football helmets with horns, to genetically modify the players’ toes, tongues, neck muscles and cerebral blood flows, to make sure only those players with smaller brains take or give the hits, and for goodness sake, to move all of the teams to the mountains.

Or maybe we should study the impact of tau?

I’ve written several of these tributes over the past decade and a half, but this one has been one of my most emotionally challenging.

The first time I met Ron Vickroy, he was a board member of the Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau, and I was a candidate for the position of President/CEO of that organization. He was working as the head of marketing for Crown American, and although he was a few years younger than me, I recognized immediately that his gifts were superior to not only his age but also to those of his peers.

I got that job, and Ron became my boss. I latched on to him as a mentor, a teacher, and quickly as a friend. Ron had one of the most fertile minds I had ever encountered. Yes, he had graduated first in his class from the Air Force Academy, and then went through the prestigious GSIA School at Carnegie Mellon University, but there was much more to Ron than IQ/EQ/QPA or any other intellectual marker. He was a compassionate, committed, community-minded leader with a nearly zero focus on materialism.

When you think about movies like “All The Right Stuff,” that’s what Ron had. After my Laurel Highlands experience, I was recruited to a VP position at the former Mercy Hospital in Johnstown and had an opportunity to recommend Ron as a member of the Foundation Board of Directors. By then Ron had made the decision to forgo his higher paying marketing job and begin work as a business professor at UPJ.
His talent was quickly recognized, and he was recruited onto the Hospital Board of Director where he served until he transitioned to the Conemaugh Board of Directors. This is where he literally found a home and served for pretty much the remainder of his life.

Ron also found his love in teaching, and no matter when you met his students, the description of his talent, dedication, knowledge, but most importantly his inspiration was their focus. Ron was not only an amazing person, a brilliant and creative individual, he was also the best of the best as an instructor, a mentor, and a leader for his students.

Besides a vacation with he and his wife, Donna, to Aruba, my fondest memories of Ron were brain-storming meetings in his family room. He filled me with hope, excitement, and commitment to progress.

There was only one exception to this. I had attempted to take up golfing in my 40’s. Ron was a scratch golfer and sometimes tolerated my presence on the golf course.

Once after a particularly awful round, I turned to him in complete frustration and asked, “Ron, do you think I’ll ever be a great golfer.”  Knowing full-well that my passion and expertise had been in music, he said, “Let me ask you, Nick, if I took up trumpet right now, would I ever be any good?”  I gave my clubs away after that game and never regretted that decision one time!

Let me close by saying there was no better board member, teacher, mentor, friend, or human being than Ron Vickroy.

Love ya, man.

At age 21, I learned a significant lesson in both humility and reality. As a musician in a pit orchestra for a very complicated musical, my job was to play an extremely difficult trumpet part perfectly. This show required every ounce of musical training, knowledge, skill, coordination and endurance I had.

After a nearly 100% flawless performance, and an above-average performance from the actors, the show ended, and the audience applauded generously in appreciation. When we gathered together after the show, all of the praise and acknowledgement of skill and talent was directed toward the actors. At first I was confused and then a little angry that not one attendee congratulated the pit musicians for their almost flawless performance, not even my own parents.

That’s when it hit me. Similar to my orchestra playing friends, but completely different from my jazz and pop musician friends, my job involved one thing only that day: perfection. Those 10,000 hours I spent practicing in my room, in practice rooms and in orchestras, bands and ensembles, were all directed toward a perfect performance. Not unlike the job of an airline pilot or a racing pit crew, it’s only when things are not perfect that you’re noticed.

Of course, that same thing was not the case when I played in lounges and clubs, but when I was hired to perform symphonic work, ice shows and shows for Disney or for other performing groups and stars, it was also about perfection. In fact, if you missed even a few important notes or  entrances in a virtual sea of notes and music, you could be fired on the spot for those minor misses.

Let’s turn our attention to health care. I’ve written about medical errors. They are a major cause of death and suffering in the United States, and I have personally experienced several incidents over the years.

It hit me today that the same rules that are applied to musicians, racing pit crews and pilots might also be directed toward the staff and teams of performers employed in our health centers and hospitals. The phrase “Close enough for jazz” definitely should not apply to medical care.

I’m not sure which personality profiles should be married to which job descriptions, but if you’ve ever spent significant time with a pharmacist, it’s pretty clear they have been inculcated with the perfection gene, and collateral damage is not in their vernacular.

On the other side of that coin, Monday mornings were eye-opening times for me in the health care CEO seat as I’d review and sign off on the recorded medical errors that could lead to eventual lawsuits or malpractice claims, even though our hospital had the lowest rate of these types of incidents of any of our peer hospitals and one of the lowest rates of error in the United States.

Let’s be clear, perfection is not always something we should strive for in every aspect of life. It can make us crazy. In fact, I love life’s imperfections, but not when it comes to someone who is cutting me open or medicating me.

What can we do to ignite our perfection gene, and how do we instill that propensity to be perfect in the right people for the right jobs? How do we create more Top Guns?

Practice works, and not unlike those musicians or pilots who sit in rehearsals and simulation labs for hours at a time, every health system should require the same.

Fifteen years ago, I performed brain surgery on a human simulation dummy, and it felt very real when I applied that scalpel to the skin and hit the skull bone beneath. It certainly got my attention.

It’s my belief we can reduce deaths from unnecessary medical accidents by building in more simulation practice to the process, by requiring periodic testing to determine skill levels, and then reassigning personnel appropriately.

Let’s stop burying our mistakes.

The past four post-op weeks have been fascinating. The skilled surgeons fixed my heart.

They replaced my aortic valve, putting the new (cow) valve perfectly in place. Plus they did it all through my femoral artery. That’s the big artery in your groin and without open-heart surgery. That was my negotiated plan.

Both Cleveland and Pittsburgh had wanted to do open-heart, but when San Diego offered to do this procedure with the new technology, and the FDA approved it, I stood my ground, and the locals agreed. Consequently, I didn’t have to fly.

That’s when the fun began. Was I nervous? Oh, heck yes. Remember I know way too much. Well, the best-laid plans are often tainted, and that’s the rest of the story. You see, I made one horrendous mistake.

On the morning of my surgery, I panicked a little and texted one of my best friends, a former administrative fellow, who now is the CEO of 10 hospitals. In my text, I asked him to reach out to his buddy at the hospital where I was being bionically altered to make sure I got the best care. This was surely a mistake on many levels.

First of all, because I was a former administrator asking for a little extra attention, it probably moved my risk-factor ratio from 1 percent to 25 percent. Then, think about it, because I asked another administrator to ask another administrator to intercede, the risk-ratio went up by a multiple of three. For those of you who are not clear about this phenomena, think about a boss asking someone to give special attention to their friend when the creed of conduct is to treat everyone with the same impeccable level of care.

I realized I may have pushed the wrong buttons when one of the physicians came to my gurney and said, “Please tell your friend to stop texting me to take good care of you. I treat all of my patients the same.” That statement confirmed all of my worst fears.

So, after fasting for a day, being poked, prodded, shaved in places that have rarely seen daylight or a razor before, and dressed in butt revealing gowns, I remembered why I wrote the book, “Taking the Hell Out of Healthcare.”

My family kissed me goodbye, they wheeled me into a cold OR and I woke up an hour later in post-op with a very nice nurse who was having trouble with one of my two groin wounds. Eventually, she called for help, and her supervisor advised her to call in the surgical physician assistants, who informed me that my stitches had not held.

At that point, they gave me a shot to numb the area and began sewing me up like a tattered Raggedy Ann doll. The result of this extra added step was a hematoma the size of a cantaloupe-and-a-half firmly planted in my groin. Consequently, the one-week recovery became two weeks, then, one of the self-dissolving stitches blew and added three more days of atrophy inducing couch-potato-laying, bandage changing.

Oh, I forgot to mention the nerve pain in my left arm from the not-so-well-placed IVs and the fact that I can’t drive for a month, but those were just extra added bonuses because I got special VIP care.

In all fairness, the doctors and nurses were amazing. And the great news is that I didn’t have a stroke, haven’t had any misplaced palpitations and, so far, I’m feeling like a new man. My family has taken care of me better than any man could have ever imagined.

My wife filled my freezer with casseroles and after the stitch blew out, I’ve stayed at my son’s house where my granddaughters have both earned their honorary nursing certifications. My daughter and her kids have visited me with gifts of food and kisses, and my Goddaughter’s family even had a picnic.

Life is good.