Paging Doctor Khullar: What Covid Can Teach Us About Climate Change
Celebrated physician and New Yorker staff writer Dr. Khullar on what climate-combatants can learn from our successes (and failures) in battling Covid-19.
Contributors:
Throughout the pandemic, including the cresting of the first wave in New York City, Dr. Khullar has been on the front lines caring for patients at Weill Cornell Medicine. All the while, he chronicled his experiences in a series of dispatches for the New Yorker, offering a rare glimpse into the emotional, mental and physical toll the Coronavirus has taken on patients, families, and the healthcare workers providing life-saving medicine, or at times, the life's final moment of compassion.
In this episode of Who's Saving the Planet Dhruv takes us into the hospital to provide a firsthand account of how the practice of medicine has evolved and in response to Covid and he provides advice to doctors in other cities who are in the throws of what New York overcame in April. We also take a step back and look at the larger picture of how society has responded to this health crisis- rooted in science- and what it can teach us about how society can and will respond to the other science based crisis of our time, climate change. Covid and Climate Change share many similarities: a time delay between knowledge of the threat and the effects on our day to day lives, the solutions have more to do with changing our behavior than any single technological or biological silver bullet, and in order to overcome the worst we'll have to sacrifice individually for the collective good.