Please applaud for our heroes.

Shut down most medical procedures. Banish coronavirus patients to nursing homes leading to thousands of deaths. Close down the economy. Watch 1.4 million health care workers lose their jobs. And then hypocritically applaud our heroes some more.

Dayna James has been an emergency nurse for 17 years — and thought the COVID-19 pandemic would mean she’d have more work than ever.

Instead, she’s filing for unemployment benefits, an ironic twist of fate shared by 1.4 million of America’s 18 million health care personnel who have lost their jobs since March — including 135,000 hospital workers.

It’s not ‘ironic’.

Setting a hospital on fire while proclaiming its importance is not ironic. It’s evil.

The 40-year-old mother of four lost a two day a week teaching job at a university hospital in March, and is barely getting any work at the children’s hospital in Miami where she was previously a regularly contracted nurse.

Clap for our heroes some more. And the politicians who deemed non-coronavirus medicine non-essential. And the media which backed them up.

The American Hospital Association has estimated that losses across the sector for the March-June period will be $200 billion.

Dentists’ offices have lost 500,000 jobs in one month, according to official statistics. Optometrists and physiotherapists have been similarly affected.

But wait, there’s an endgame. Since it’s the media, can you guess what it is?

Since there is no single-payer public authority that mediates and caps prices, costs depend on negotiations between hospitals and insurers and have been rising for decades.

If only we had socialized medicine, we’d have even far more lost jobs and worse medical care. But think of this as a dry run.