DAVID BEGNAUD:
The two men running the ship told us that almost 87 percent of the ship is empty. Sounds alarming, right? They have 200 beds, and 87 percent are empty.
Now, here’s what they said: We’re ready for whatever the government wants to do. We are waiting to be told by the government.
So, I went to the governor, and I told him exactly what was going on. And he said, “Look, I’m not happy with what the protocol was from the beginning.”
He said, initially, they will prioritize only the most critically ill patients to go to the Comfort. And he said there was a layered process that complicated things.
Then, the governor, Ricardo Rossello, said: “I started to remove some of those layers, and I said, listen, take people on the ship who are not critically ill, but they need good medical care and they can’t in the hospital, where the lights are on and the AC doesn’t work.”
That’s what the governor said.
Within hours, I received a tweet from a third-year medical student who said, “Let me tell you what a nightmare it has been to get to Comfort.”
He said: “We have a pediatric patient who desperately needs to get off this island, either to a hospital on the mainland or to Comfort.”
And he said, “I went through Google and the local newspaper to find the number. I didn’t find it.”
Now, here’s how things work. About 30 minutes after that tweet was published and this medical student’s story was published, the governor’s spokesperson responded with numbers that should be able to help.
The bottom line here, Guglielmo, is that asking questions incessantly and doing good journalism is what makes the difference. It is not a person. There is no heroic work that is done by any journalist, except for the people who return to the same officials and ask some of the same questions, who are constantly looking for the right answer that will make the difference.
