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Returning to normal is a terrible idea when COVID patients are overwhelming hospitals across the world. How can things be normal if our healthcare systems are n

Returning to normal is a terrible idea when COVID patients are overwhelming hospitals across the world. How can things be normal if our healthcare systems are nearing collapse? You might be willing to accept the risk of getting sick on your behalf, but by advocating a return to 'normal' before we have the capabilities to deal with this virus, you are advocating for putting even more stress on healthcare systems across the globe already on the verge of failure. There are patients in heavily-impacted areas who cannot access healthcare for other life-or-death concerns because hospitals are crumbling under the workload of COVID cases. The article even states this; COVID is likely to reach endemic status eventually, but we are still nowhere near that. Ignoring it will have enormous costs on vulnerable populations -- even more than it already has.

qwerty456127 5y ago
Politicians say this all the time. I doubt anything we can do can change this. Just build more hospitals. We have resolved the masks shortage, we will resolve the shortage of ventilators and hospitals also. We can even soften the shortage of medical personnel by directing the unemployed to paid full-time medical boot camps. I understand this is much easier said than done but we hardly have a choice if we actually want to do something useful.
- 001spartan 5y ago
  Building more hospitals is a long-term process. Training medical personnel is a long-term process. Emergency measures intended to bridge the gap are untenable politically, and people are dying because of it. Thousands of them per day. The answer to this is not to say 'we can't fix the underlying issues right now, so we're not going to do anything'. The answer is to take measures that we _can_ implement until those longer-term solutions can come into play.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    What measures we can implement doesn't matter if these measures don't work.
    - 001spartan 5y ago
      Vaccines work. Vaccinated people are far less likely to contract COVID, and when they do they are far less likely to require healthcare resources beyond the standard treatments for someone who has the flu (stay home, rest, treat symptoms as needed). Social distancing and masking work. They reduce the possibilities for spread between people -- not perfectly, but enough to reduce it to a manageable level for our current healthcare resources. Saying that our current measures to combat the virus don't work is disingenuous at best, and a blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst.
      - qwerty456127 5y ago
        > Vaccines work. I have always been a vaccine enthusiast but now I see infection surging even in the most vaccinated areas. > masking work I have always been saying this, even when officials denied. Yes, mandatory masks in public transport and grocery stores are the only of all the deployed measures I recognize as actually working. > blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst. I actually don't think we have learnt much.
        001spartan 5y ago
        The vaccines are not failing. They are incredibly effective at preventing infections _and_ reducing severity of breakthrough infections. The Delta variant is more easily transmitted and more likely to cause breakthrough infections, but that does not account for the majority of the surge [0]. It's largely a surge amongst unvaccinated populations, buoyed by a smaller proportion of breakthrough infections. The ease with which Delta spreads, combined with relaxed restrictions on gatherings and masking, accounts for the surge in infections. Despite the decline in vaccine effectiveness (I've seen conflicting studies of how much this has changed), they're still incredibly effective compared to any other protection we have at the moment. None of this changes the fact that people are going to continue to die until a higher proportion of the population receives a COVID vaccine -- and that we _can_ mitigate this through other measures. None of these things lead me to the conclusion that we should return to normal and accept an increased healthcare system burden and death rate. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm?s_cid=mm7034e1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
  - N1H1L 5y ago
    > Building more hospitals is a long-term process. Training medical personnel is a long-term process. Emergency measures intended to bridge the gap are untenable politically, and people are dying because of it. Thousands of them per day. It's like the whole chip shortage thing. Most people ask why aren't we building more chip-building plants? The answer is we are doing that, but it takes billions of dollars and a lot of trained manpower to set up such a factory, and all of that takes a lot of time. These are what are called in economics as highly inelastic supplies, which it seems is unknown to many commentators, who BTW have a habit of quoting Econ 101 in every discussion.
- vanattab 5y ago
  Lol homeless people with scalpels what could go wrong?
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Besides hardcore homeless drunkards there is a sufficient population of totally reasonable people who have just lost their jobs because of the crisis and can totally do nurse/paramedic job if taught for free and supported financially. I would steadily go for this if I had lost my job.
- jrockway 5y ago
  If medical boot camps are as effective as Javascript boot camps... you may want to wait a while before exposing yourself to other people's germs.
  - tharne 5y ago
    > If medical boot camps are as effective as Javascript boot camps... you may want to wait a while before exposing yourself to other people's germs. This line made me both laugh and cry a little.
  - zzt123 5y ago
    So, the initial job will get done, but please don’t look under the covers, and please do not attack it with anything infectious? Might be better than having nothing, in the case of ICUs being overwhelmed and overcapacitied.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    This is an incredibly bad faith argument. There is a whole lot of room between a 6 week bootcamp and a 12 year medical program. I'm pretty confident someone would learn to treat Covid patients in 2 years. edit: your comment did make me laugh though. So perhaps you were just going for humor, in which case you succeeded and I apologize for being a wet blanket.
- nradov 5y ago
  There was never a real ventilator shortage. Doctors figured out quickly that mechanical ventilation does more harm than good for the vast majority of COVID-19 patients. It's only used on a few percent of hospitalized patients now. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/nhcs/intubation-ventilator-use.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/nhcs/intubation-ventilator-...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hcurtiss 5y ago
It seems one option is to increase hospital capacity. There should be ways to do this without needing more RNs and MDs.
- 001spartan 5y ago
  I agree! But the issue is that where these processes exist they are not designed for the scale of the current pandemic, are too inconsistent when implemented, and rely on spare personnel that do not currently exist.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  That's not an option. Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA. The only way to deal with this pandemic is to vaccinate as many people as possible. It's the best way that we know of to reduce spread of, and the effects of catching covid-19.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    > Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA. This has always been a systemic problem of how hard medical education and license are to get. I'm pretty sure medical personnel can be trained to reasonable (mediocre but better than nothing) skill level much faster and for much cheaper than it normally is.
    - xyzzyz 5y ago
      Yeah, if the problem is lack of staff in COVID wards, just start COVID-specific training programs and hire COVID-specific personnel, who are only allowed to work with COVID patients. That should reduce training time a lot. This approach might sound like some completely out of the box, untested and extreme approach, yet it’s completely standard in industries that are not as heavily regulated as medicine is. Alas, healthcare has its Rules and Procedures and Best Practices, and as a result, everyone else must adjust and implement novel approaches, so that the healthcare industrial and regulatory complex doesn’t have to.
bingohbangoh 5y ago
Are they really overwhelming hospitals? This keeps being repeated but most hospitals operate at about 80% capacity as-is. Places in Tennessee and Florida are currently, with COVID-19, operating at about 80%. [0] If we look at Israel, which has a very high vaccination rate, we see that they're supposedly running out of hospital space. [1] But the article linked doesn't say _anything about their actual numbers atm_ and points to a fiscal problem rather than a manpower problem. There was a recent Science Magazine article that states that 13% of the hospitalized-and-vaccinated group are under 60. That amounts to 39 people in a country of 9 million. [2] I've asked this before both here and elsewhere: If these vaccines aren't "good enough," what is? At what point does this become "zero COVID" in that "nobody can ever die from this disease again?" [0]: this may have changed -- things are changing quickly -- so I'd be curious if you have any recent (<1 week old) information on this. [1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-s-public-hospitals-say-they-won-t-take-in-more-covid-patients-1.10141209 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-s-public-hospital... [2]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vaccination-blunts-does-not-defeat-delta https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-... -- and I took this from Louis Rossmann's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYtfT7HsJq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYtfT7HsJq0
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Are they really overwhelming hospitals? Yes. > This keeps being repeated but most hospitals operate at about 80% capacity as-is. They aren't overwhelming total hospital capacity, they are overwhelming specialized resource capacity, particularly ICU capacity. > Places in Tennessee and Florida are currently, with COVID-19, operating at about 80% In Florida and numerous other states (not Tennessee), there are significant areas over 95% ICU capacity. [0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/17/us/covid-delta-hospitalizations.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/17/us/covid-delt...
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > there are significant areas over 95% ICU capacity It's not like there is any large ICU capacity anywhere anyway.
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Vaccinated Covid patients are NOT overwhelming hospitals. LA county isn't that extraordinarily highly vaccinated. It's a county much denser and with a greater population than a lot of countries in Europe. There's been <4000 fully vaccinated people in 8 months admitted to the hospital. Only 36 have died. Not a lot more have needed ventilators. This is a blip in the ocean of hospitalizations in LA county.
switch007 5y ago
> COVID patients are overwhelming hospitals across the world Extraordinary claims…
hncurious 5y ago
It does sound like they are on the verge of collapse... "Tallia says his hospital is 'managing, but just barely,' at keeping up with the increased number of sick patients in the last three weeks. The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and its outpatient clinics have no appointments available.” "Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that UAB Hospital cancelled elective surgeries scheduled for Thursday and Friday of last week to make more beds available" “We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn’t, like in recovery rooms,” says Camins. “The emergency room was very crowded, both with sick patients who needed to be admitted” "In CA… several hospitals have set up large 'surge tents' outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat … patients. Even then, the LA Times reported this week, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways.” “Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread… Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots to triage the hordes of… patients.” “We’ve never had so many patients,” said Adrian Cotton, chief of medical operations at Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino County.” ...but then again, maybe not. These are all quotes from 2018, flu season. https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1422243808536715265 https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1422243808536715265
umvi 5y ago
> How can things be normal if our healthcare systems are nearing collapse? Why are healthcare systems unable to scale (horizontally or vertically) to meet demand unlike every other industry in the world? That should be a red flag that you don't have a robust system when it is unable to scale. We've had nearly 2 years since the start of covid to make healthcare systems more robust. Why haven't we? Maybe we should focus on that instead of telling people to mask up from cradle to grave. Imagine if the computer industry were the same and we asked people to limit their internet time for 2+ years because the servers and routers that make up the internet were always on the brink of collapse? Like... wouldn't we just build more servers and routers until demand could be met?

qwerty456127 5y ago

Politicians say this all the time. I doubt anything we can do can change this. Just build more hospitals. We have resolved the masks shortage, we will resolve the shortage of ventilators and hospitals also. We can even soften the shortage of medical personnel by directing the unemployed to paid full-time medical boot camps. I understand this is much easier said than done but we hardly have a choice if we actually want to do something useful.

001spartan 5y ago
Building more hospitals is a long-term process. Training medical personnel is a long-term process. Emergency measures intended to bridge the gap are untenable politically, and people are dying because of it. Thousands of them per day. The answer to this is not to say 'we can't fix the underlying issues right now, so we're not going to do anything'. The answer is to take measures that we _can_ implement until those longer-term solutions can come into play.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  What measures we can implement doesn't matter if these measures don't work.
  - 001spartan 5y ago
    Vaccines work. Vaccinated people are far less likely to contract COVID, and when they do they are far less likely to require healthcare resources beyond the standard treatments for someone who has the flu (stay home, rest, treat symptoms as needed). Social distancing and masking work. They reduce the possibilities for spread between people -- not perfectly, but enough to reduce it to a manageable level for our current healthcare resources. Saying that our current measures to combat the virus don't work is disingenuous at best, and a blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst.
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      > Vaccines work. I have always been a vaccine enthusiast but now I see infection surging even in the most vaccinated areas. > masking work I have always been saying this, even when officials denied. Yes, mandatory masks in public transport and grocery stores are the only of all the deployed measures I recognize as actually working. > blatant disregard for everything we've learned from the past year and a half at worst. I actually don't think we have learnt much.
      - 001spartan 5y ago
        The vaccines are not failing. They are incredibly effective at preventing infections _and_ reducing severity of breakthrough infections. The Delta variant is more easily transmitted and more likely to cause breakthrough infections, but that does not account for the majority of the surge [0]. It's largely a surge amongst unvaccinated populations, buoyed by a smaller proportion of breakthrough infections. The ease with which Delta spreads, combined with relaxed restrictions on gatherings and masking, accounts for the surge in infections. Despite the decline in vaccine effectiveness (I've seen conflicting studies of how much this has changed), they're still incredibly effective compared to any other protection we have at the moment. None of this changes the fact that people are going to continue to die until a higher proportion of the population receives a COVID vaccine -- and that we _can_ mitigate this through other measures. None of these things lead me to the conclusion that we should return to normal and accept an increased healthcare system burden and death rate. [0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm?s_cid=mm7034e1_w https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e1.htm?s_cid=mm...
- N1H1L 5y ago
  > Building more hospitals is a long-term process. Training medical personnel is a long-term process. Emergency measures intended to bridge the gap are untenable politically, and people are dying because of it. Thousands of them per day. It's like the whole chip shortage thing. Most people ask why aren't we building more chip-building plants? The answer is we are doing that, but it takes billions of dollars and a lot of trained manpower to set up such a factory, and all of that takes a lot of time. These are what are called in economics as highly inelastic supplies, which it seems is unknown to many commentators, who BTW have a habit of quoting Econ 101 in every discussion.
vanattab 5y ago
Lol homeless people with scalpels what could go wrong?
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Besides hardcore homeless drunkards there is a sufficient population of totally reasonable people who have just lost their jobs because of the crisis and can totally do nurse/paramedic job if taught for free and supported financially. I would steadily go for this if I had lost my job.
jrockway 5y ago
If medical boot camps are as effective as Javascript boot camps... you may want to wait a while before exposing yourself to other people's germs.
- tharne 5y ago
  > If medical boot camps are as effective as Javascript boot camps... you may want to wait a while before exposing yourself to other people's germs. This line made me both laugh and cry a little.
- zzt123 5y ago
  So, the initial job will get done, but please don’t look under the covers, and please do not attack it with anything infectious? Might be better than having nothing, in the case of ICUs being overwhelmed and overcapacitied.
- spiderice 5y ago
  This is an incredibly bad faith argument. There is a whole lot of room between a 6 week bootcamp and a 12 year medical program. I'm pretty confident someone would learn to treat Covid patients in 2 years. edit: your comment did make me laugh though. So perhaps you were just going for humor, in which case you succeeded and I apologize for being a wet blanket.
nradov 5y ago
There was never a real ventilator shortage. Doctors figured out quickly that mechanical ventilation does more harm than good for the vast majority of COVID-19 patients. It's only used on a few percent of hospitalized patients now. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/nhcs/intubation-ventilator-use.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/nhcs/intubation-ventilator-...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

hcurtiss 5y ago

It seems one option is to increase hospital capacity. There should be ways to do this without needing more RNs and MDs.

001spartan 5y ago
I agree! But the issue is that where these processes exist they are not designed for the scale of the current pandemic, are too inconsistent when implemented, and rely on spare personnel that do not currently exist.
mywittyname 5y ago
That's not an option. Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA. The only way to deal with this pandemic is to vaccinate as many people as possible. It's the best way that we know of to reduce spread of, and the effects of catching covid-19.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > Hospitals in many were already understaffed before the pandemic. And the pandemic has caused such a severe worker shortage that traveling RNs are getting paid upwards of $200/hr in remote parts of the USA. This has always been a systemic problem of how hard medical education and license are to get. I'm pretty sure medical personnel can be trained to reasonable (mediocre but better than nothing) skill level much faster and for much cheaper than it normally is.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    Yeah, if the problem is lack of staff in COVID wards, just start COVID-specific training programs and hire COVID-specific personnel, who are only allowed to work with COVID patients. That should reduce training time a lot. This approach might sound like some completely out of the box, untested and extreme approach, yet it’s completely standard in industries that are not as heavily regulated as medicine is. Alas, healthcare has its Rules and Procedures and Best Practices, and as a result, everyone else must adjust and implement novel approaches, so that the healthcare industrial and regulatory complex doesn’t have to.

bingohbangoh 5y ago

Are they really overwhelming hospitals? This keeps being repeated but most hospitals operate at about 80% capacity as-is. Places in Tennessee and Florida are currently, with COVID-19, operating at about 80%. [0] If we look at Israel, which has a very high vaccination rate, we see that they're supposedly running out of hospital space. [1] But the article linked doesn't say _anything about their actual numbers atm_ and points to a fiscal problem rather than a manpower problem. There was a recent Science Magazine article that states that 13% of the hospitalized-and-vaccinated group are under 60. That amounts to 39 people in a country of 9 million. [2] I've asked this before both here and elsewhere: If these vaccines aren't "good enough," what is? At what point does this become "zero COVID" in that "nobody can ever die from this disease again?" [0]: this may have changed -- things are changing quickly -- so I'd be curious if you have any recent (<1 week old) information on this. [1]: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-s-public-hospitals-say-they-won-t-take-in-more-covid-patients-1.10141209 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/israel-s-public-hospital... [2]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-vaccination-blunts-does-not-defeat-delta https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/08/grim-warning-israel-... -- and I took this from Louis Rossmann's video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYtfT7HsJq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYtfT7HsJq0

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Are they really overwhelming hospitals? Yes. > This keeps being repeated but most hospitals operate at about 80% capacity as-is. They aren't overwhelming total hospital capacity, they are overwhelming specialized resource capacity, particularly ICU capacity. > Places in Tennessee and Florida are currently, with COVID-19, operating at about 80% In Florida and numerous other states (not Tennessee), there are significant areas over 95% ICU capacity. [0] [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/17/us/covid-delta-hospitalizations.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/17/us/covid-delt...
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > there are significant areas over 95% ICU capacity It's not like there is any large ICU capacity anywhere anyway.

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

Vaccinated Covid patients are NOT overwhelming hospitals. LA county isn't that extraordinarily highly vaccinated. It's a county much denser and with a greater population than a lot of countries in Europe. There's been <4000 fully vaccinated people in 8 months admitted to the hospital. Only 36 have died. Not a lot more have needed ventilators. This is a blip in the ocean of hospitalizations in LA county.

switch007 5y ago

> COVID patients are overwhelming hospitals across the world Extraordinary claims…

hncurious 5y ago

It does sound like they are on the verge of collapse... "Tallia says his hospital is 'managing, but just barely,' at keeping up with the increased number of sick patients in the last three weeks. The hospital’s urgent-care centers have also been inundated, and its outpatient clinics have no appointments available.” "Dr. Bernard Camins, associate professor of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, says that UAB Hospital cancelled elective surgeries scheduled for Thursday and Friday of last week to make more beds available" “We had to treat patients in places where we normally wouldn’t, like in recovery rooms,” says Camins. “The emergency room was very crowded, both with sick patients who needed to be admitted” "In CA… several hospitals have set up large 'surge tents' outside their emergency departments to accommodate and treat … patients. Even then, the LA Times reported this week, emergency departments had standing-room only, and some patients had to be treated in hallways.” “Hospitals across the state are sending away ambulances, flying in nurses from out of state and not letting children visit their loved ones for fear they’ll spread… Others are canceling surgeries and erecting tents in their parking lots to triage the hordes of… patients.” “We’ve never had so many patients,” said Adrian Cotton, chief of medical operations at Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino County.” ...but then again, maybe not. These are all quotes from 2018, flu season. https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1422243808536715265 https://twitter.com/justin_hart/status/1422243808536715265

umvi 5y ago

> How can things be normal if our healthcare systems are nearing collapse? Why are healthcare systems unable to scale (horizontally or vertically) to meet demand unlike every other industry in the world? That should be a red flag that you don't have a robust system when it is unable to scale. We've had nearly 2 years since the start of covid to make healthcare systems more robust. Why haven't we? Maybe we should focus on that instead of telling people to mask up from cradle to grave. Imagine if the computer industry were the same and we asked people to limit their internet time for 2+ years because the servers and routers that make up the internet were always on the brink of collapse? Like... wouldn't we just build more servers and routers until demand could be met?