City of Gulf Breeze issued the following announcement.
Stay home, self-isolate, don’t travel or go to gatherings. That’s the message that James Thorp, MD, a resident of Gulf Breeze, gave to Gulf Breeze News today. He is also calling for the unbundling of our health care system, freeing up the ability to test for COVID-19 without the “rigamarole” of going to a hospital’s ER, getting bloodwork, seeing a doctor and incurring a thousand dollar bill.
He says there is a fallacy being spread that people who don’t have symptoms don’t need to be tested.
“It’s wrong, it’s dead wrong. No pun intended, but it will cause a lot of deaths.”
Dr. Thorp, who is an expert in prenatal medicine and has performed surgeries on fetuses in the womb, was once asked to testify before congress in 2003 by President George W.
Bush because of his technical expertise. He’s published over 150 peer-reviewed publications and had professorial appointments at University of Florida and Florida State.
He is concerned about the lack of testing in the U.S. compared to other countries.
“That’s a grave error,” Dr. Thorp says, “It’s a failed system.”
As the father of five children, he knows that many hard working people don’t have the resources to get tested and must return to work to remain solvent.
He says one of the doctors involved with the COVID-19 death in Santa Rosa County was back at work four days into his quarantine, and was visiting with other doctors in the doctors’ lounge. “They have to pay their bills,” Dr. Thorp said.
He says his son knows a man who returned from visiting Italy was unable to get a COVID-19 test and had to return to work at a New York City restaurant, serving hundreds of patrons each day and potentially infecting them all with the virus.
He says being asymptomatic is no guarantee one is not actively infected and infectious, similar to the way Typhoid Mary spread that bacterial disease around the beginning of the 21st century despite having no signs of the disease herself. “I can list 10 different viruses” that spread through asymptomatic hosts, “Dr. Thorp said.
One of the reasons he calls the U.S. health care system “a flop” is because hospital administrators, who are compensated in the multiple millions of dollars per year, receive bonuses by cutting costs on staffing and technical services.
He recommends that residents contact legislators to ask them to free up testing measures. He adds that Quest and LabCorp are now conducing COVID-19 tests, “but it costs money.”
He also wants every resident to self isolate, wash hands and avoid crowds. “You don’t know who has it,” Dr. Thorp says.
He estimates that out of 400 million citizens in the U.S., 10% will become infected and 1% will die, by a conservative estimate. If that is the case, the U.S. may see 400,000 deaths or more.
He recommends the U.S. “completely shut down” for one month and “unbundle this greedy health care system.”
We may never return to the status quo, Dr. Thorp says.
“This is probably going to change our lives forever,” he warns.
A self-described conservative, Dr. Thorp says he is so upset he is ready to vote for Bernie Sanders due the the “complete failure” of the current health care system in the U.S.
“My kids are hard workers, they deserve to be taken care of. They deserve better than the greed of this system.”
Original source can be found here.
Alerts Sign-up