Once again: people are dying, right now, because they can't get access to health care, because hospitals in some places are overflowing with mostly unvaccinated people with COVID. This seems like a fairly location-specific issue, so I would expect that different places could do different things at different times.

We can and are focusing on other things, but hospital capacity is a good one to work on keeping down. Once that's down, I guess we see where we are and probably lift some restrictions.

Where are people dying because they cannot get access to healthcare?

My large city in Texas is now down to 35 ICU beds across the entire city. That's how.

A friend's father-in-law had to drive 4hrs away to find a hospital with capacity for his cardiac surgery. That's how.

And why is that the fault of the general public? These hospitals had 2 years to figure this out.

Why would it be the fault of hospitals? They have no incentive to construct more ICUs. A large percentage of covid patients entering the ICU for ventilation will die, and you can't collect on a dead patient. ICUs are a money hole -- they require specialized equipment, isolation construction, experienced medical team, etc. If a hospital is motivated by profit, they would construct as few ICUs as legally possible.

It’s not my problem to fix hospitals. I shouldn’t be forced to wear some worthless mask because my lousy government can’t find a way to staff some kind of emergency Covid hospital. I only pissed away two years of my life waiting for them to do so… Time is up. Not my problem.

Masks aren't useless, which is pretty obvious to anyone who thinks about the physics of an airborne pathogen for a few minutes.

Research demonstrates the same thing.

Why would anyone spend billions and billions on field hospitals when there's an easily available vaccine that prevents all of this? No one expected the uptake to be so bad. I mean even T**p is telling people to get their boosters.

https://healthandwelfare.idaho.gov/news/idaho-activates-cris... - comes to mind. Here where I live in Oregon, during the Delta surge, people were waiting on "elective" surgeries for things like cancer treatment, and the hospital system was pretty clear that some ended up dying because the hospital was overloaded.

I'm not freaking out. I'm just trying to avoid getting myself and my family sick. Who likes being sick? I'm not living in some underground bunker, just taking basic precautions. It's the same reason I buckle my seatbelt: huge potential upside with negligible downside. So worst case scenario, I accidentally wore a mask I didn't need to wear. Oh no.

I have no reason to believe COIVD would be bad for me. But what if it is? Then I'd rather get sick when things have calmed down and hospitals are at normal capacity.