RALEIGH, N.C. — As Democrats prepare to kick off the official nominating process for Joe Biden, there will other business to attend to as well. The party, as a whole, must agree on a platform for the election season.
The top issue listed in the platform proposal is “Protecting Americans and Recovering from the COVID-19 Pandemic.”
“Since we do have a pandemic, and it's been so grossly mismanaged, and since we have a president who has disregarded the science, that has disregarded the best advice of public health authorities, who has given this inconsistent misleading advice, it's incredible to have," says Rep. David Price, a Democrat serving North Carolina's 4th District. "So yes, public health is an important aspect of this.”
He says perhaps six months ago, there would have been other top issues, but COVID-19 is clearly at the top of the list now.
“I don't think anything gets fixed until the pandemic gets fixed, in any sort of lasting way. So we've got to deal with the health issue,” he says.
The country has been grappling with this virus for about six months now. There are well over five million deaths in our country from COVID-19. Almost immediately, concerns were raised across the country whether or not health care workers had the PPE, or personal protective equipment, they needed.
“In some cases, what we are hearing is that some people are being asked to re-use PPE because they do not have the same supplies that some of the larger health care systems do,” says Dennis Taylor, who works at Wake Baptist Medical Center and serves as the president of the N.C. Nurses Association.
Taylor says there is always a watchful eye on whether or not there is bed space, if cases were to increase.
“We know that at one time it was really good whenever we had suspended a lot of our elective surgeries. Now that we have gone back to doing those, occupancy rates have gone much higher,” he says. “80-85 percent, sometimes 90 percent in the ICU's. So, we don't have the same surge capacity now that we had two or three months ago.“
Health care is one area you can expect to see clearly defined differences between Republicans and Democrats this election cycle.