Maybe doctors are so used to death that they have a blase attitude to it.
No, it's drummed into them from the first year in med school that when they hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. SARS is a zebra, therefore they reject it as a diagnosis.
You and I, and perhaps our fellow threadmate, have a fanciful turn of mind, but in deference to Henry he understands genetic sequencing of viruses better than most doctors, who are, in my experience, very intelligent but not terribly imaginative outside their own narrow field of specialization. Therefore, I can't quite tell whether Henry is just very astute or also very imaginative, as well. I think both, probably, which I mean as a compliment.
Imagination isn't useful for doctors, one would assume, because for the most part they don't encounter anything that requires imagination. Nevertheless, sometimes a good imagination is just what's needed.
Like imagining what will happen if SARS patients aren't quarantined.
I don't really mind all the old and wrinklies dying, we all die eventually. I try to resign myself to death daily. I do mind the nurses and the doctors and the police and the paramedics getting sick and the hospitals being shut down so that everybody else can't use them.
But as you and I know, the problem with a good imagination is that you can imagine all kinds of creepy crawlies under the bed. I could say that we come from a long line of people who were cautious, and thus got to reproduce, but even Darwin Award winners come from a long line of people who got to reproduce before their progeny were removed from the gene pool.
So. Zebras or horses? Henry says zebras, and Henry knows his nucleotides, so my bet is on zebras. |
