You know, I see snarky little comments like this becoming more and more common on this site, and I'd just like to point out that they are not helpful in any way. Who is it directed towards? Do you think you are convincing anyone, or encouraging a productive discussion? I'd be willing to bet that the overwhelming majority of people on this website are vaccinated. I know I am.
In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn't assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.
I can understand immuno-compromised people, an underlying medical condition, for whom a vaccine may not work or may be dangerous. Undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer? Got it: vaccines won't help you (or anyone else) until you can get past the cancer.
I don't agree with an argument from stand-my-ground, my-body-my-choice principles. I could agree with such a line of reasoning, if a personal choice did not present an immediate danger to anyone else.
This is a very infectious disease with severe health consequences. No one has control over the outcome, if they choose to infect another person. Maybe it's no big deal for them. Or maybe it wrecks their life, long after the vaccine objector has left the scene.
What are some other reasons for avoiding vaccination?
> STOCKHOLM, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Sweden has decided against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-11, the Health Agency said on Thursday, arguing that the benefits did not outweigh the risks.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-...
I'm not super well versed in the science but it seems like reasonable parties advise against vaccination in certain scenarios. Also knowing that government bodies are more likely to prioritize group outcomes over individual outcomes it seems reasonable for individuals to be skeptical.
A recent CDC study [0] joins plenty of others from last year in showing that these people were at least as protected from infections and severe outcomes during delta as those who were vaccinated without a prior infection.
Avoiding getting something that offers little benefit and offers even small risks makes sense to me.
You've probably spent the last year being told these people are trying to murder your family though, so it also makes sense to me if you don't agree with this.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
It's not that simple: vaccination is more consistent at producing an immune response and it's stronger. The confound in both cases is that it wanes over time, so comparing someone who was vaccinated a year ago to someone who had COVID last month — or vice versa! — is telling you more about the elapsed time than anything else.
Getting boosted, even after having been infected, is a cheap and easy way to reliably keep your immune response high without unpredictable timing. It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
I encourage you to read the linked study, particularly the parts about the included cohorts. The recovered cohort didn't have any kind of stipulation that their infection was recent. The text does call out waning efficacy in the vaccines, but it does not mention the same for infection.
> It's much less risky than getting COVID even if you could organize the equivalent of a “pox party”.
Does this have something do with what I said?
"The evidence in this report does not change our vaccination recommendations. We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19.”
The reasoning is easy: many more people do not develop as strong a response from infection as they do from vaccination, and vaccination happens on a known schedule. This is especially of interest since the relationship here was reversed with Alpha, and is still unclear with Omicron - the figures I’ve seen have relatively recent infection somewhere between 2 doses and 3 in terms of efficacy, and infected plus vaccinated being the strongest.
Now, if you think from a public health perspective that makes the call very easy: vaccines are cheap and effective, and more reliably produce an immune response. Waiting for people to get infected means that the schedule is unpredictable (overloads happen), and the timing being variable means that you might have people thinking they’re protected but they were part of the group who never mounted a strong response, or who have waned over time. Rather than having people get infected randomly or hoping that they had a strong response, it’s much easier to spend a few seconds vaccinating them so you have a higher confidence that they’re protected.
The study shows a cohort of people who had infections sometime between the advent of testing and march of 2021, and that cohort had better outcomes than the vaccinated but uninfected cohort. How can that be? What does it mean for immunity solely from vaccination to be "stronger" and "more reliable" if the outcomes are worse? What am I missing here?
For the alpha vs delta point, what does it matter if the relationship flipped? They're basically equivalent either way. The important part is that they're both much better than seronaive.
I think you might have lost track of my original response to the question that started this thread (what is a reason to not get vaccinated) where I said:
> Having already had an infection before you were able to get vaccinated.
How are pox parties and "waiting for people to get infected" and "having people get infected randomly" relevant to the scenario that I mentioned, where people don't have the choice of getting vaccinated before they get infected, since its already happened? There's no waiting, there's no parties, there is just dealing with the cards you've been dealt. By now there should be far more of these people than straight up seronaive folks.
Similarly, "We know that vaccination is still the safest way to protect yourself against COVID-19", sounds like the same thing: if you need to gain protection from covid, we recommend getting it via vaccine rather than illness. That doesn't apply in this scenario, since protection has (as it seems to me we see empirically here) already been attained.
Apologies if my edit in quotating you is misrepresenting what you're saying, but it's how I read it.
Okay.
If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
I think so. I'm not a doctor, nurse, anything. But I expect anyone who hasn't seen COVID for a year, it would help. Probably the same benefit as a booster that follows vaccination for people who [think they] have never been infected.
Vaccination has its own risks. I believe there is very slight risk from the injection itself.
But -- I just got booster dose, my third shot, this week. I had to go to a pharmacy a couple of blocks from my house. I walked. I had to cross a street, with the traffic signal, but there were a couple of cars. They didn't hit me. This time. Then I had to go inside the pharmacy talk to some people, wait about ten minutes. Everyone was wearing masks, but honestly it was the most contact I've had with a random mix of people all week...
If I'd needed to drive miles out of my way to get the vaccination, that's also nonzero risk.
And then... well, it seemed to hit me pretty hard, the vaccine, this time. I felt awful for two days. Then I was fine. But it seemed like a bigger reaction than previous doses. I think that's supposed to happen, actually.
Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
It's given me some things to think about, thanks.
I think thats a reasonable interpretation of what the original quote (which wasn't mine) was saying.
> If people have already been infected with COVID, is vaccination going to do them any good?
The linked data shows that it did seem to lead to a small improvement for folks during delta. Whether or not that small improvement is worth it is a judgment call.
> Anyhow, I thought about it, and made my choice. I think it was the right way to go for me.
Not that anybody needs this affirmation, but I'm 1000% in support of you making that call.
I consistently see anti-vaccination rhetoric on HN.
This is exactly backwards from reality. The groups you mentioned are at much higher risk from covid and ergo it is much more important to vaccinate. The risk in absolute terms will remain much higher even with vaccination but this is a poor reason not to vaccinate. The reason you vaccinate is the degree of risk mitigated not the expectation of reducing that risk to zero.
They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
There are certainly degrees of immune system pathology. If you are receiving medical care for such a situation, by all means please follow your doctors instructions and not mine!
>They won't exhibit an immune response to COVID spike proteins. From the virus, from a conventional vaccine, or from their own cells' production following an mRNA vaccine.
This is absolutely untrue. Most people who are immunocompromised have an immune system that works poorly not none. They are worse off than others as far as mortality and morbidity with the vaccine and without it compared to healthier individuals but they are absolutely able to develop antibodies and benefit from vaccination.
The CDC says they are 65-80% less likely to end up in the ER presenting with covid if vaccinated and boosted.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e3.htm?s_cid=mm...
Immunocompromised people that took your advice would be 3-5x more likely to die if infected with covid and given prevalence will very likely to be infected in the year ahead of us. Please refrain from giving medical advise without first taking the time to understand the topic you are speaking on. It's more important not to spread health misinformation than chat on business and tech.
Vaccines do not stop transmission of Covid nor do they stop you from getting Covid.
They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.
Thus the decision to vax or not is clearly a personal choice.
They don't stop it, but they do decrease your chances of acquiring it and they do reduce the viral load you shed.
> They merely decrease your chances of getting severe Covid or dying from Covid.
So they prevent you from taking up a hospital bed, exposing the people who have to care for you to COVID and preventing other non-COVID emergencies from being tended to. That seems to impact others to me.
Or are you about to make a bunch of Socio-economic and cultural justifications for obesity that you will not extend to the unvaccinated?
Secondly, and this is the one that people find weird, once you've weighed X pounds, and lost some significant mass, you must eat less calories than simple "calories in is calories out" would suggest, because our physiology reacts as if food is scarce, and will store fat to the detriment of all other functions.
1. Sugar and its substitutes are bad for you, yes thats true (Thank you FDA for recommending 10 servings of grains, and backing the lipid hypothesis which caused low fat (aka High Sugar) products to appear everywhere.
2. Unless the obese somehow violate the law of thermodynamics if you reduce energy in while maintaining energy out mass will decrease.
edit : Also, what's the protocol/norm about posting the same reply in multiple threads? I can see some pros and cons to it being within standard behavior, and don't see a clear answer as to which is larger
I promise you, if losing weight were "easy" then most people would look like Hollywood action heroes.
https://www.wfae.org/health/2021-09-30/novant-says-9-of-10-c...
... as a co-morbidity of COVID. Clearly the most effective option for people who are obese (and other people at elevated risk) is to get vaccinated.
Or are you about to make a bunch of Socio-economic and cultural justifications for obesity that you will not extend to the unvaccinated?
You might as well be telling people to take antibiotics 'just in case' because a partially resistant strain of something is going around.
That partially resistant strain won't be "partially" resistant for long.
Where have you seen otherwise?
[0] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...
[1] https://www.jwatch.org/na54386/2021/12/15/transmission-risk-...
[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2788485
If you want to retreat to "ok, they probably do actually help a little bit with that, but I think the amount to which they help with that is small enough that [thing] isn't worth it.", then ok, but, like, I think you should probably make it explicit.
(earlier, the topic was about like, health insurance, not employment, and so I'm using [thing] to cover both of those things.)
It just represents a general fatigue that a lot of people have with the anti vaxxers. That we have hard numbers that vaccines actually work seems to be irrelevant to them, so maybe they would be convinced by snark and sarcasm instead?
> In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
You are comparing getting a couple of free shots at the pharmacy to much more complicated lifestyle circumstances.
and you think this is an experience unique to your viewpoint? do you think the people reading your words who have vaguely opposing views might not also be fatigued when your group flatly denies their concerns as irrelevant?
if you find yourself in an us-vs-them mindset and decide to ditch empathy, all you do is widen the divide.
In the sense that a conspiracy theorist or a crank gets tired of people not believing them, yes, I guess they are annoyed. I just little empathy for them: I want this pandemic to be over, and they are getting in the way of that. Barring that, I hope that they can take responsibility for their choices without forcing the consequences on everyone else.
funny, because most everyone i know wants this too, and it’s always “the other side” which prevents the pandemic from “being over”. from a person standing in the middle, it appears that it’s the divide which blocks this, whereas from deep behind lines i guess it looks like everyone past that divide is blocking things.
well good luck winning a battle in the modern world through force of will. there’s a reason the world powers generally don’t conduct large wars openly these days, and that many conflicts are instead resolved via international agreements (especially of trade). if you do discover a way to resolve the social woes in life without leveraging pro-social behaviors (like cooperation/empathy), write me and share your findings so that i in turn can better the state of our society. and if you spot the inherent contradiction of the previous sentence, i’ll buy you a beer.
Yes, that's true. The anti-vaxxers think the vaccines will kill them or make them sterile, or something...it is really hard to keep track of what their current theory is. Again, it's a free shot you can get at the pharmacy, the only rational reason for avoiding it is if you thought it could do harm rather than just being thought ineffective.
But given that unvaccinated are dying 10X more in hospitals due to COVID than unvaccinated cases that come in, maybe this problem will just solve itself the good ole fashioned Darwin way. Mind you, as long as they don't increase unvaccinated deaths, aren't clogging the hospitals or causing my health care costs/premiums to rise (faster than they would otherwise), I believe they should have the liberty to make that decision.
in one sentence, you admit that you don't understand what knowledge some person is operating with. in the next sentence, you claim to know what is rational for that person to do. if you're using "rational" in the literal sense, then you've leapt to premature conclusions.
and i get it. it's exasperating. there's a bunch of people who don't want to take a vaccine. and from the outside it seems that as more information becomes available to this group, their vocalized reason for avoiding the vaccine changes. they're being dishonest, and that's infuriating!
if this is what you're seeing, it doesn't necessarily mean every individual within that group is shifting their story. some certainly are, but many aren't and the group behavior can be explained by things similar to "evaporative cooling": some people leave the group as a result of new information (new people are still getting vaccinated, every day), and the people left behind are the ones for which the previously dominant argument wasn't their primary reason for not getting the vaccine -- and so the dominant argument of the group then changes.
group dynamics encapsulate way more complexity than just that one effect. and i think it's worth considering. you see that your own individual behavior is way more consistent than the other side's behavior -- and it is. but that's comparing an individual (yourself) to a group (anti-vaxxers). it's apples to oranges. the other individuals aren't seeing your individual behavior. they're seeing your group's behavior. they're seeing the exact same type of inconsistent and contradictory behavior that you're so fed up with.
what's the way out? well, we haven't found it, so it's hard to say for sure. but i think it has to involve empathy: seeing beyond the group, and relating to each other as individuals.
You are right. I am just assuming that there is a rational explanation in their head for why they don't want to vax, and as you point out, it might not be. Nor are the explanations for vaccine hesitancy consistent.
> but i think it has to involve empathy: seeing beyond the group, and relating to each other as individuals.
I'm not really compassionate enough to see this as an empathy issue: if their choices didn't affect me I wouldn't care one bit what they decided to do. Right now we have a huge society-wide problem that requires some sort of societal cohesion and consensus to defeat, but we lack that, and I don't think any of us have the energy to fight this battle at the individual level.
walk me through it: how do we achieve societal cohesion if not by empathy? a society is a network of individuals and entities, and cohesion implies that the individuals want to "stick together". why would i want to be cohesive with the parts of that network that don't acknowledge me? individuals are drawn together by common interests, shared feelings, mutual understanding, ... empathy. it's the basis of every relationship i've ever held onto. how do you build a cohesive society without that? i really don't mean to be obtuse... this is all that i know.
But at the end of the day, after two years of watching this insanity in our society, where wearing a mask is considered "weak", where taking a vaccine, a vaccine that we're incredibly lucky to have, is considered a sign of Satan, or micro tracking chips, or sterilization or whatever is the latest loony thought of the day, I'm done.
“laughed out of polite society”? think that one over a bit. sounds pretty impolite to me. (also a decent example of how a group [“polite society”] can inadvertently establish foregranted truths [its own politeness] and be thoroughly baffled when the outgroup challenges that fundamental belief. i’m not accusing anyone here of groupthink — just that it’s a prominent aspect of the present moment).
anyway, i get your point. we all have our limits and there’s no shame in that. IMO if you’re at the point where you truly can’t converse productively with some group — and don’t have the desire to grind it out and search for a way to actually relate to/reach them, then just exit the conversation. leave it to those rare overwhelmingly compassionate individuals who are able and willing to endure to bridge the gap. sometimes you’ll do more good by saying nothing than by fanning the flames. not always easy in an era where people can feel defined by the beliefs we advertise, but if you really believe that these opposing views of the vaccine are harmful to our society, then let go of your apparel and delegate to the best methods for resolving these opposing views. maybe that’s linking to data-based writings (sounds like you’ve tried that, to no success). maybe you’ve found that you can’t actually provide anything to resolve these oppositions. that’s okay. someone else will have it. yield the floor to them.
Can attest to that. As a flat earther, I am just so sick of the snarkiness of everyone who believes what mainstream science preaches.
We should all equally appreciate ALL differing views because no idea is more or less valid than any other idea. Evolution, creationism, alien seed planted by Xenu, they all deserve our time and attention.
It's far more nuanced than that. I have now had three doses of the vaccine, and I had Covid subsequent to the third dose. Israel is now moving on a fourth dose, and the vaccine manufacturers are making an Omicron-specific variant. If my city continues with prior behavior, and mandates a booster for a virus I've now had, am I an "anti-vaxxer" for not wanting the unnecessary dose?
That you're characterizing the situation in this binary way says a lot to how the entire issue has been treated as a cartoon political issue. But many millions of people are in exactly this situation, today (i.e. those who already had Covid, and are now being required to get a vaccine).
Plenty of people said they already had COVID, and they are still in the 10X more likely to die statistics. Either they are had something else (like a flu or a cold, you wouldn't know without a test), or something about natural immunity isn't working. I won't speculate, I believe its the former (easier to confirm that you got the vaccine then if you really got COVID).
People who have had Covid are at least as well-protected against serious illness as anyone who is vaccinated, and probably more so given the latest variants:
> During October 3–16, compared with hospitalization rates among unvaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, hospitalization rates were 19.8-fold lower (95% CI = 18.2–21.4) among vaccinated persons without a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, 55.3-fold lower (95% CI = 27.3–83.3) among unvaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis, and 57.5-fold lower (95% CI = 29.2–85.8) among vaccinated persons with a previous COVID-19 diagnosis.
Or are you saying a lot of people think they've gotten covid but actually got something else?
If it's the latter case, how do you feel about encouraging that the people who don't want to be vaccinated because they've had a prior infection get an antibody test, and get vaccinated if it comes back negative, and if they do indeed have antibodies we treat them the same way we'd treat someone vaccinated?
If you think that natural immunity is comparable to vaccine-generated immunity, but that proposal still sounds unappealing to you, I'd be curious why.
I imagine toward the people who behave as if vaccines aren't effective, which are nonzero.
> In my opinion, that line is the equivalent of saying "gosh, maybe black people should just stop committing crimes if they don't want to go to jail" or "gosh, maybe gay people should just stop having unprotected sex if they don't want HIV."
I mean. The latter statement is a thing gay people actually DID say, long before the government told them to. Gay people noticed that it was spread through sex and that condoms work. Not even going to touch the former statement since I don't feel like wading into the criminalization of black people. Suffice to say, not convinced by either of these comparisons.
> I am begging you, and everyone else, PLEASE, if you want to make a point, please do it in a respectful way that doesn't assume anyone who disagrees is stupid. If you need to be snarky, go do it on the-site-that-must-not-be-named.
I'd label your preceding statement to be snarky, fwiw.
The fact that he added the word "Gosh" to his comment doesn't make it insulting or target any specific group of people. You're taking great offense over nothing and distracting from a meaningful discussion.
What is real and true matters. There's lots of things that are hard to decide, but we know that they're not millions of hidden deaths from getting vaccinated, and we know that there are millions of people protected from dying because they got vaccinated.
There are vanishingly few circumstances other than legitimate medical conflicts that warrant being unvaccinated. Namely, crippling anxiety of planning/scheduling the appointment, or being misled by trusted advisors (Fox Entertainment or doctors who should have their medical license revoked).
Other than that, I have very little patience or sympathy.
And yet we have cardiologists and eye doctors and chiropractors telling the public that the vaccine is dangerous and that we would be better off without it.
I saw someone mentioned that a doctor/professor from Johns Hopkins was raising concerns about college age kids getting vaccinated. I looked him up. He's a surgical oncologist. Guess what the epidemiologists, virologists, and immunologists at Johns Hopkins are recommending?
Oh ya, and the surgical oncologist turned epidemiologist just so happens to have a book about the pandemic that he is pushing right now. I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.
I am not so sure. HN is the most "covid is just a flu, masks and respirators dont matter, teachers should teach when sick with covid those lazy bastards" place I regularly visit. I would be surprised if vaccination rates did not followed the same general political alignement.
Encryption is probably the only thing that most people on HN agree with.
Not accurate AT ALL.
NPR has a better source that also gives COVID patient percentage.
Marin County, CA and Santa Cruz, CA county have 95% vaccination rates and are doing worse in ICU capacity than Escambia county, FL who has 55% vaccination rates.
For most ICUs running at 80 to 90 percent capacity is standard.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-flow/2-healthc...
Marin and SC counties have 13% of beds filled by covid patients. Escambia has 21% filled by covid patients. This appears to directly contradict what you claimed.
Marin and Santa Cruz have LESS Covid patients and are closer to overflowing than Escambia.
Also covid patients only make up 13% of the ICU?
Something is odd with your flattening the curve narrative blaming overflow on Covid patients.
So I went ahead and checked this, and it's wrong.
Escambia's ICU capacity is 87% full, SC's is 90% full (and SC is a bad choice, as they have a total of 21 ICU beds in the county, they use bay area ICU beds for overflow, which are currently sitting at ~80% capacity), and Marin's is....40%. So I'm not sure what data you're looking at, but it seems to just be wrong.
Secondly, no, covid capacity really is the problem, because for the last year and a half, hospitals were reducing non-critical care. That means you have tons of people who need hip replacements or brain surgery or tumor removal who haven't been able to get it. Many of them will need to recover in the ICU a bit, so you'd want a higher baseline ICU use post-elective surgery freeze, as that implies that the "clog" is being recovered from.
If the hospital is still full due to covid patients, those elective surgeries will never get done, leading people who never caught covid to suffer too. So low covid capacity, but higher overall use temporarily means that we're catching up to all the deferred non-covid care, something we really need to do!
The other possibility is that you mean that the 70-80% that ICUs normally run at is somehow problematic (because well like I just said, we did actually "flatten" it by deferring elective ICU recovery for more than a year in many places). The US already has more ICU beds per capita than most nations, even other developed nations, so I'm not sure what your idea here is other than perhaps, "The us population is too unhealthy or is providing too much healthcare", which are both interesting positions to take for sure.
Bullshit.
Actual data says that Covid patients in ICU take up between 8% to 20ish% of admissions.
COVID is not causing the curve to be need flattening.
The medical system is.
Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.
Yes, and actual data says this is a problem, because we don't have the capacity to handle a sustained 15% increase in ICU use. That is simply not a thing we have the capacity to handle.
> Maybe they shouldn't fire medical professionals who got immunity through COVID infection instead of the vaccine.
The less than 1% of people who fall into this category are probably not the issue. 1% more nurses isn't going to address 15% more patients.
> <a bunch of non quantitative opinion based unprovable emotional gish gallop stuff I didn't read.>
You really should have, because none of it was "emotional" and most of it was quantitative, so this makes you look rather silly. Like c'mon, you've lied about how full hospitals are in California, when confronted on that you claim I'm "gish galloping" with emotional nonsense that's just true[0] factual content about how we handle and have handled hospital capacity and why your (completely conjectured!) conclusion was wrong.
[0]: https://revcycleintelligence.com/news/40-hospitals-in-ny-for...
100 - 15 is 85.
There's 85% left to handle it.
Where is this 85% going and why is it less of a concern in flattening the curve?
why is no one concerned about this 85% of non-covid ICU patients??
Seems to me covid is a small fraction of ICU cases.
Seems to me maybe the ICU should work on handling its caseload..
Seems to me maybe there's systemic problems like the AMA limiting the number of health professionals to keep the salaries up and firing the ones who have natural immunity.
Maybe that's why the curve can't get flattened.
but one thing that is crystal clear from the data is that covid is not the primary cause of hospital overflow.
The short answer would be "aging" and "accidents". And we already do huge amounts of research to lessen the impact of those things, but if you have any ideas, do let me know.
It's less of a concern because it isn't really something we can change. We can't make people age less quickly, or have fewer accidents. And while we can (and did!) treat some of those things less, that has severe downsides in the long term.
> Seems to me covid is a small fraction of ICU cases.
No, it's a 20% bump in what the system is meant to handle. Systems don't generally do well when asked to sustain 20% more of what they were doing, forever.
> Seems to me maybe there's systemic problems like the AMA limiting the number of health professionals to keep the salaries up and firing the ones who have natural immunity.
Can you explain why you keep bringing up nurses when we discuss ICU capacity? Last I checked, we didn't need to vaccinate beds.
and they still haven't figured out a way to handle the ICU load?
you would think with all kinds of random unplanned disasters happening all over at any time ..like terrorist attacks or earthquakes or tornadoes... they would be able to increase capacity by 20%
the problem is not covid patients, the problem is either a poorly planned system or news media sensationalism
They can, for brief periods. You start by overflowing to nearby hospitals, you can't do that for covid though, because its global. So you try to drop non-urgent care, but they've already done that. You can't stop treating non-urgent care forever, it's only a temporary approach.
So you're left with, well, reducing serious covid case rates. This can absolutely be done, by the way, with a combination of vaccination and varying masking policies as necessary. Because that's the only tool left after all of the others have been exhausted.
> and they still haven't figured out a way to handle the ICU load?
There is actually a really easy solution, it's just ethically terrible. You refuse (or triage last) unvaccinated covid patients. This solves most of the problems. It is however ethically unconscionable.
> the problem is not covid patients, the problem is either a poorly planned system or news media sensationalism
Yes, we all recognize that the global healthcare system is not able to handle a sustained 10-20% increase in demand. That doesn't make it "poorly planned" (are you willing to pay 20% extra in healthcare costs to cover the increased slack?)
You say everything like you have the singular objective answers beyond a shadow of a doubt even if your ideas are just one of many possibilitys.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...
I'll tell you that here in Chicago, based off data, and anecdotes: really depends on the neighborhood. Vaccinated areas? Doing fine. Undervaccinated areas? Not doing so well.
Gosh, it's like vaccines work and that's the way out of this.