https://www.wbaltv.com/article/covid-19-emergency-actions-ma...
Hospitals in my area have cut 20% of surgeries (ie: triaged out care to make room for COVID19). The governor has deployed National Guard to the hospitals to help out with tasks.
Are you just blind to the issues happening right now? This is happening, this is happening now. Take off your blindfolds and talk to a damn nurse or doctor. This is happening all over the place as far as the eye can see.
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Just call up your local-clinic and ask them for a flu-shot. Stand in line for 4-hours for things _COMPLETELY_ unrelated to COVID19, and come back and tell me that its fake. Go ask the receptionist "why is the line so long", and they'll tell you: COVID19.
I know because I done it. (Well, not for a flu-shot but for a TDAP. Nearly the same thing)
/s
That was an actual exchange I had with someone a few weeks ago with this same scenario. They'd gone from 'it's all faked' to "well, yeah, there may be people there now, and they're taking resources from non-covid patients, but the govt wants it that way, that's why they pay hospital more for covid patients! they're incentivizing people getting covid!"
I don't think it makes any sense at all, but interactions like these are more signs to me that it's harder to have meaningful interactions 'across the divide' these days.
Note that this varies by where you are. Locally, there is no health care crunch: it's easy to get a flu shot or other vaccine with no wait, and ICUs still have capacity despite a huge increase in cases. We're probably screwed in a few weeks since there's only about a 60% vaccination rate here and the most recent surge didn't start until maybe two weeks ago.
In the province of Quebec, where we have a highly vaccinated population, the intensive care units (ICUs) in all hospitals will be full within two weeks, if the rate of transmission and hospitalization continue this way. Demand greatly outstrips supply.
In Canada, the financial incentives for hospitalization and discharge are very different. Physicians get paid by a complex mix of hourly pay in addition to a fee-for-service schedule, both paid by the government. Hospitals get paid by the type of patient they admit, and their length of stay, but not always in a straightforward way.
In Canada, because of the remuneration system, physicians are the most influential decision-makers in deciding who gets to use the ICU. Roughly, no one doesn't get admitted "because they can't pay", and no one gets admitted "because they have money" .
Since hospitals are overwhelmed in Quebec, physician's incentive would be to discharge patients rather than admit. Their hourly wage wouldn't rise if they got more patients. Indeed, there is some evidence that as ICU capacity drops, physicians start discharging patients from the ICU earlier.
I should be fair to physicians in Quebec: their behaviour reflects a deep concern about the public health emergency rather than their financial gain.
I believe that, in Canada, all hospitalized patients in the ICU really need to be there.
Source: I have been studying hospitalizations due to COVID-19 illness in Quebec, Canada, and providing forecasts to the local government since the start of the pandemic.
I understand that adding a doctor or nurse isn't immediate.
Just as I understand that if a production system I oversee crashes under load, it may not have been foreseeable.
But if the system is still crashing under load in five years? Ten years? At what point is it my fault?
The U.S. healthcare spending in 2020 was $4.1 trillion. I still see the same 100 ICU beds cited as capacity in our local COVID updates.
The Maryland hospital system can support a bit over 10,000 hospitalizations. Over 3000 of those hospitalizations are COVID19 right now, and our cases continue to grow exponentially.
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Our hospital systems don't _normally_ get hit with 3000+ cases of a singular disease. Compared to other parts of the country, we have more hospital space, nurses and more, and we're still feeling stressed from all of this.
You _cant_ have enough hospital space during a pandemic. You just can't. The disease grows too fast, you get hit with way more cases than you've ever seen in the past 10, 20, 30, 50, 100 years. It doesn't make sense to design a system with 100-years worth of slack. It makes more sense to ask the public to do actions to cut back on hospitalizations during these rare 1-in-a-hundred-year situations.
And Chinese style hard lockdowns of whole cities are even more effective than that. Doesn't mean I want the government to have that power.
The state has a right, (7-2 decision, hardly controversial) to forcibly vaccinate its citizens against Smallpox.
It doesn't matter what you "want". There's well over 100 years of precedent on this particular issue. Go fight with history if you're really pissed.
Everything is just as controversial and the issues are the same.
Jacobson v. Massachusetts said the solution to compulsory vaccination is democratically repealing policy and law. This is exactly what these people want and are fighting for
Are you complaining that I'm using rhetorical techniques against you? The smallpox and 1918 flu pandemics from 100 years ago are guidance for what is going on today.
We can look at how our grandfathers solved the issue in their time, and compare-and-contrast with what worked today. As you mentioned, it was controversial back then. Both you and I have arguments we can borrow from them.
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How about instead of arguing against history, you actually take those arguments and use them for yourself? Or perhaps you recognize that the arguments said 100+ years ago weren't actually that strong or powerful.
> Jacobson v. Massachusetts said the solution to compulsory vaccination is democratically repealing policy and law. This is exactly what these people want and are fighting for
Cool.
Now explain how you'd get rid of smallpox in the early 1900s.
You're welcome to add whatever you think adds to the discussion.
Or do you just sit around and counterpunch in discussions, never actually contributing directly? There's a reason why sitting around and just countering arguments is called the "fallacy fallacy" / "Argument from fallacy".
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I bring up smallpox and "Jacobson v. Massachusetts" for a few reasons.
1. We defeated smallpox. It took decades, but it was soundly defeated.
2. Legally, there's a strong set of arguments that prove that these measures are constitutional.
3. There were big controversies in the early 1900s over these arguments, and we can replay those arguments again if you so desire. In effect, we know that the state's right to protect our health care system trumps the individual's choice on whether-or-not to get the vaccine.
This is the line I'm responding to.
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You know damn well that libertarians do this bullshit when playing with "use of force" language in these discussion.
A fine is "government use of force" to a libertarian. I'd rather not get stuck in the weeds over such details. But you're trying to pin me from the other side, and I don't appreciate it.
Yes, I referred to profit, because profit is what "not wasting resources" translates to for the capitalist, but the real underlying moving force is economic and real regardless of ideology.
We largely imply that Denmark's hospitals are more efficient than US hospitals. In terms of cost, in terms of how much they can handle, in terms of number of COVID19 cases, etc. etc.
Even if we cut down to highly-developed parts of the USA, such as New York vs Denmark specifically (rather than including all of the lesser-developed rural areas which puts the US at a disadvantage), we're clearly not as good at health care as Denmark.
Depends on how full hospitals get. We all get into accidents. We fall and hit our heads, we might get a heart attack, a pregnancy might suddenly go bad and a C-section (or worse surgery) is needed.
As COVID19 fills up hospitals around the country, the risk isn't from Omicron itself anymore, as much as it is from an overburdened health care system.
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The big example was the Montana train derailment last summer. It was difficult (but possible) to get all of the injured to an appropriate hospital, many being forced to go to hospitals hours away because the nearby hospitals were full of COVID19 patients. But this new wave of Omicron is even worse than the summer of 2021 by any measurement.
> - What level of state-sponsored violence is justifiable to further reduce that risk?
While the health care system of the USA is technically a free market, with a mix of for-profit hospitals (and charity / religious hospitals, and a few state-sponsored ones for groups like veterans)... people expect hospitals / health care systems to be functional.
Since the state is ultimately responsible for the health care of its local population (whether they want to be responsible or not), its important to take actions needed to keep our hospital open.
The state will pull in the national guard, they will call in Navy hospital ships, they will declare emergencies to help. From that perspective, asking everyone else to get vaccinated or booster-vaccinated is just more of the same, its another action to minimize hospitalizations. Forced vaccinations are far more effective than national guard in this situation.
> Governments and societies have been acting out-of-control and it needs to stop.
I know someone who went to work while testing positive for COVID19. The amount of apathy and callousness the "individual" has in this situation knows no bounds.
"Individualism" is now selfishness. Its more important to save a few hours of PTO / leave rather than protect your fellow customers or coworkers from the disease.
People have lost their goddamn minds over this. They ignore the hospitalization stats, they ignore the overflowing morgues. They focus on selfish self-centered action rather than community.