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So true and not mentioned enough by the media. The fact that we lost more than 4000 ICU beds over last year (during the Corona pandemic!!) because of personnel

So true and not mentioned enough by the media. The fact that we lost more than 4000 ICU beds over last year (during the Corona pandemic!!) because of personnel shortage is mind-boggling. Instead of rewarding those who worked these horrible jobs and maybe attract new workers with better conditions (e.g. more holidays), better pay or tax reduction, our politicians did campaigning and ignored the upcoming winter. Now they blame it on the unvaccinated and want to force high-speed vaccinating as many people as possible. But it won't help now. And it won't work either because they also messed up the whole vaccine supply chain. I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in their own progress.

pintxo 5y ago
> I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in their own progress. I posit that any sane and intelligent person would choose NOT to go into politics. Because of the system we as society have created around the job.
_moof 5y ago
I might be working from old info here but my understanding is that vaccination reduces the ICU burden. Assuming that's still good info, is it totally unreasonable to blame the unvaccinated for ICU overload?
- throwntoday 5y ago
  Yes because no effort was made to increase ICU capacity which was continues to be the biggest issue
  - fabian2k 5y ago
    No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and others likely will have permanent damage from the severe course of the disease. The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.
    - throwntoday 5y ago
      Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.
      - fabian2k 5y ago
        Vaccines reduce severe courses of the disease by about 90%. The number vary depending on what you look at exactly, and for elderly people boosters are really mandatory to keep the vaccine effective. Reducing the number of severe cases by a factor of 10 is very from from not working.
      - the_why_of_y 5y ago
        That's like saying, people are still hospitalized after car crashes so seatbelts and airbags are useless.
        harambae 5y ago
        The safety of modern cars has been shown to lead to more aggressive driving, so this metaphor may track on more levels than you realize.
      - mthoms 5y ago
        >Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary. What "narrative"? What are you even talking about? No-one, including the person you responded to, has claimed that vaccinated people can't get sick. The claim (backed by statistics) is that the unvaccinated are being hospitalized at a much higher rate and for a much longer duration. You're arguing a point that no-one is disagreeing with.
        angelzen 5y ago
        True, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized at a higher rate and for a longer duration. However, we are not talking about "the unvaccinated", rather about "a tiny unfortunate fraction of unvaccinated people". There are 4,690 covid patients in ICU beds and 25M unvaccinated people. Assuming all covid ICU patients are unvaccinated, the covid ICU incidence rate within the unvaccinated population is 0.02%. For an analogy, we could reason that because the prison population skews 90/10 male/female, all males should either undergo a vasectomy, or pay a recurring 10k euro fine. I hope this is obviously unethical.
  - the_why_of_y 5y ago
    Training an ICU nurse takes about 5 years. The only realistic option during the pandemic would be to encourage immigration of ICU nurses from poorer countries, but that just moves the problem elsewhere.
    - throwntoday 5y ago
      5 years of training didn't stop these trained nurses from blowing up people's lungs on ventilators early on.
    - mandmandam 5y ago
      I have a suspicion that ICU training for a COVID specific nurse could be much shorter - if there were any will or basic common fucking sense among policy makers, and if there were fewer people making excuses for those who ghoulishly and cynically privatized healthcare for profit across the Western world.
      - crooked-v 5y ago
        A "COVID specific nurse" still needs the entire slate of training that goes with respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, etc, and all the secondary complications that come from those.
        mandmandam 5y ago
        Then train 3 nurses in respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, and secondary complications separately. Put them under an experienced nurse, and incentivize them to add to their skills when they're not working. Look at the sheer difference in numbers of healthcare professionals between America and Cuba. If they can do it even after decades of cruel and unusual sanctions, we sure as fuck can too.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - m4rtink 5y ago
- makomk 5y ago
  Vaccination does reduce the proportion of people that need ICU beds, but there are pretty rapid diminishing returns on just vaccinating more; countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination. Also, vaccinating younger lower-risk people doesn't help because they're at substantially lower risk of needing the ICU even unvaccinated than someone older or higher-risk who is vaccinated and because the vaccines aren't really useful to stop the spread of the disease either. Countries have generally had significantly higher vaccine acceptance amongst older people who need it more. (Though I think one of the big problems Germany has is their vaccine uptake amongst the elderly is somewhat low compared to other countries.)
  - microtherion 5y ago
    > countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination Which countries? I find it hard to get data at vaccination prevalence in ICU population specifically, but in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated).
    - kgwgk 5y ago
      > in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated) For the 80+ group the latest data for hospitalisations is 47% vaccinated, 31% non-vaccinated, 22% unkown. https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status
      - martneumann 5y ago
        Well yeah, for 80+ with a vaccination rate of 92 %. If you look at the total value, it appears that only 11 % of hospitalized are double vaccinated, though the latest seven day average puts that number at 27 %.
        5y ago
- disambiguation 5y ago
  Its never unreasonable to blame the victim, just bad taste. Also consider its their tax dollars being squandered and mismanaged.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  It is not totally unreasonable but there is a component of blind blame to it. It will become a discussion after the pandemic and I don't think this will be too beneficial for our public health care system and health insurance.
crooked-v 5y ago
With exponential spread, the actual number of ICU beds really doesn't matter, because whatever you've got will be overwhelmed across a similar timeframe anyway. The only way to actually fix the problem is to get the R-value below 1, which requires mass vaccinations.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  I can't believe people still think herd immunity is possible. Delta. Omicron. Our technology sucks and is slow, we can't achieve R < 1 this way.
  - manwe150 5y ago
    It can’t be all that bleak. The mRNA technology would let us inject omicron-specific boosters tomorrow, but then there is a lot of other safety hurdles that have to be met before it gets authorized and then distribution hurdles to convince people to take it… Mathematically, we will get to R=1 this way, some day or another, with some percentage of people getting it via illness and some via vaccination. The choice is still ours on how and when.
    - disambiguation 5y ago
      Take a look at history to see how bleak it can get. At this point I'm less worried about covid and more worried about the global rise in authoritarian trends.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations. Although there is still skepticism regarding duration of the protection.
      - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
        > At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations. So you say that at some stage there will be vaccines for COVID-19 that are not nMRA (Pfizer, Moderna) or Viral vector (AstraZeneca) Why? The people who are happy with vaccines are fairly happy with these vaccines and might refine them, but not about to dump them entirely for a different technique. in fact mRNA vaccines are the new hot thing. And the people who really aren't happy with these vaccines, will never be happy. They'll find a way to object. So what's the incentive for such a classical vaccine? Who's going to root for it?
oezi 5y ago
It is mentioned enough by the media. Thank you. But it seems strange to realize that people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die like flies over the course of two to three weeks. No money in the world makes that acceptable for many. With the availability of the vaccines (at least in the developed world) this has become a pandemic of the uninformed know-it-alls ("Querdenker" = Crooked thinker, as they are call here). If you work on an ICU to rescue people that tell you that this is all a scam by the Pharma-Industrial Complex, you would want to quit. It is not the media's fault where we are now, nor are the politicians (entirely) to blame. At least half the blame should be frankly put on social media disinformation and the usual tabloid press (Springer/Bild) that fabricate Fox-News style lies.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  More money and better shifts and not firing unvaccinated would fill the gap.
  - burntbridge 5y ago
    You can't have people who are not vaccinated working at a hospital. This has been known for years and has been practiced for years. Vaccinations prevent the spread of disease. Surely you aren't questioning this.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Before the vaccine (less than a year ago) they prevented the spread by using n95 masks and ppe. Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Knowing that the point of the vaccine is to prevent serious illness in the person receiving it. I struggle to understand why you would not even question how important they are in that setting unless you are worried they have dropped that extra safety component.
      - burntbridge 5y ago
        >Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Vaccines reduce the risk of spreading the virus. People who are vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. This absolutely doesn't mean you won't die if you are vaccinated. Think seat belts in car accidents. It is all about reducing risk. On mass, at population levels, this means ICU have capacity to take in other seriously ill people. If ICUs are full and there is a plane crash or whatever where many people are seriously injured we are screwed.
Krasnol 5y ago
> So true and not mentioned enough by the media. This is nonsense. The topic has been in the news almost from the beginning of the crisis. The government is being constantly criticised for that. Why do you people repeat this? It's a lie. The fact that this topic is now being used by anti-vaxxers to cloud their anti-social behaviour and shift the growing anger of the vaccinated population away from them is ridiculous. There are two issues here and stacking hospital beds and personal would not make anti-vaxxers better in any way.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- daddylongstroke 5y ago
  Why are the vaccinated so threatened by the non-vaccinated in Germany? Why the anger? Why the fear?
  - Krasnol 5y ago
    Have you been locked up somewhere for the last 2 years or are you trolling me?
    - daddylongstroke 5y ago
      Not locked up. My wife, and most of our friends are either RNs, MDs, PAs, etc. We've had COVID. Now my wife is dealing directly with people who are dealing with adverse reactions to the vaccines they took (many of them nurses and doctors themselves experiencing neurological symptoms continuing for months and months at a time, and not allowed to speak about it for fear of losing their licensure). I only ask because it seems unreasonable to me to fear a virus that only meaningfully impacts .3% to .5% of your population. So, why not answer? Why are you afraid of the unvaccinated?
      - Krasnol 5y ago
        This is utter conspiracy bullshit. Neither would anyone lose their license about reporting side effects nor are those in any way so prevalent that your wife would be dealing with multiple amounts of them nor are they in any way close to as severe as the effects of COVID and long COVID. You're lying and the fact that you seriously think any sane person would believe this is both hilarious and sad as it's a very beautiful example of this covidioten movement we have to deal with.
jashmatthews 5y ago
In Germany, the majority of the cases are from unvaccinated people getting sick and infecting other people https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/ https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/
- cqadt 5y ago
  That is one paper from a couple of postdocs.
  - marton78 5y ago
    As are pretty much all papers ever written
- incrudible 5y ago
  Never trust a model whose parameters you did not pull out of your own ass.
burntbridge 5y ago
I'm sure what you are saying is true but it doesn't really address the problem at hand. The bird has flown the coup and now action needs to be taken to save lives. Absolutely agree with you about hospital/medical resourcing though, we have the same situation in Australia. In the name of efficiency these services get paired to the bone, and we have no capacity to respond to unusual events. The Neo liberal worldview posits that redundancy is bad. I think Western countries in general are suffering from this Anorexia. It cripples innovation as well.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  What would save lives would be a lockdown again.
Klemotio 5y ago
And what did you to help out? Did you suddenly switch your job to become a nurse? How do you think we would have been able to ramp up everything while in a pandemic?

pintxo 5y ago

> I have long lost all hope in politicians. 99% of them are ridiculous creatures without a spine and only interested in their own progress. I posit that any sane and intelligent person would choose NOT to go into politics. Because of the system we as society have created around the job.

_moof 5y ago

I might be working from old info here but my understanding is that vaccination reduces the ICU burden. Assuming that's still good info, is it totally unreasonable to blame the unvaccinated for ICU overload?

throwntoday 5y ago
Yes because no effort was made to increase ICU capacity which was continues to be the biggest issue
- fabian2k 5y ago
  No, that isn't the biggest issue. The ICU is the last resort, it's the point where we throw incredible amounts of effort and hardware at the problem to gain a chance of still saving them. And even then 50% still die, and others likely will have permanent damage from the severe course of the disease. The biggest issue is that not enough people got vaccinated.
  - throwntoday 5y ago
    Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary.
    - fabian2k 5y ago
      Vaccines reduce severe courses of the disease by about 90%. The number vary depending on what you look at exactly, and for elderly people boosters are really mandatory to keep the vaccine effective. Reducing the number of severe cases by a factor of 10 is very from from not working.
    - the_why_of_y 5y ago
      That's like saying, people are still hospitalized after car crashes so seatbelts and airbags are useless.
      - harambae 5y ago
        The safety of modern cars has been shown to lead to more aggressive driving, so this metaphor may track on more levels than you realize.
    - mthoms 5y ago
      >Vaccinated are still being hospitalized. How much longer will you buy into the narrative that they are not when so many countries are showing evidence to the contrary. What "narrative"? What are you even talking about? No-one, including the person you responded to, has claimed that vaccinated people can't get sick. The claim (backed by statistics) is that the unvaccinated are being hospitalized at a much higher rate and for a much longer duration. You're arguing a point that no-one is disagreeing with.
      - angelzen 5y ago
        True, unvaccinated people are being hospitalized at a higher rate and for a longer duration. However, we are not talking about "the unvaccinated", rather about "a tiny unfortunate fraction of unvaccinated people". There are 4,690 covid patients in ICU beds and 25M unvaccinated people. Assuming all covid ICU patients are unvaccinated, the covid ICU incidence rate within the unvaccinated population is 0.02%. For an analogy, we could reason that because the prison population skews 90/10 male/female, all males should either undergo a vasectomy, or pay a recurring 10k euro fine. I hope this is obviously unethical.
- the_why_of_y 5y ago
  Training an ICU nurse takes about 5 years. The only realistic option during the pandemic would be to encourage immigration of ICU nurses from poorer countries, but that just moves the problem elsewhere.
  - throwntoday 5y ago
    5 years of training didn't stop these trained nurses from blowing up people's lungs on ventilators early on.
  - mandmandam 5y ago
    I have a suspicion that ICU training for a COVID specific nurse could be much shorter - if there were any will or basic common fucking sense among policy makers, and if there were fewer people making excuses for those who ghoulishly and cynically privatized healthcare for profit across the Western world.
    - crooked-v 5y ago
      A "COVID specific nurse" still needs the entire slate of training that goes with respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, etc, and all the secondary complications that come from those.
      - mandmandam 5y ago
        Then train 3 nurses in respiratory disease, inflammatory disease, and secondary complications separately. Put them under an experienced nurse, and incentivize them to add to their skills when they're not working. Look at the sheer difference in numbers of healthcare professionals between America and Cuba. If they can do it even after decades of cruel and unusual sanctions, we sure as fuck can too.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - m4rtink 5y ago
makomk 5y ago
Vaccination does reduce the proportion of people that need ICU beds, but there are pretty rapid diminishing returns on just vaccinating more; countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination. Also, vaccinating younger lower-risk people doesn't help because they're at substantially lower risk of needing the ICU even unvaccinated than someone older or higher-risk who is vaccinated and because the vaccines aren't really useful to stop the spread of the disease either. Countries have generally had significantly higher vaccine acceptance amongst older people who need it more. (Though I think one of the big problems Germany has is their vaccine uptake amongst the elderly is somewhat low compared to other countries.)
- microtherion 5y ago
  > countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination Which countries? I find it hard to get data at vaccination prevalence in ICU population specifically, but in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated).
  - kgwgk 5y ago
    > in Switzerland, the figures I see cited is 60-70% of patients unvaccinated (With 90% of 80%+ year olds in the population being double vaccinated) For the 80+ group the latest data for hospitalisations is 47% vaccinated, 31% non-vaccinated, 22% unkown. https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status https://www.covid19.admin.ch/en/vaccination/status
    - martneumann 5y ago
      Well yeah, for 80+ with a vaccination rate of 92 %. If you look at the total value, it appears that only 11 % of hospitalized are double vaccinated, though the latest seven day average puts that number at 27 %.
      - 5y ago
disambiguation 5y ago
Its never unreasonable to blame the victim, just bad taste. Also consider its their tax dollars being squandered and mismanaged.
raxxorrax 5y ago
It is not totally unreasonable but there is a component of blind blame to it. It will become a discussion after the pandemic and I don't think this will be too beneficial for our public health care system and health insurance.

crooked-v 5y ago

With exponential spread, the actual number of ICU beds really doesn't matter, because whatever you've got will be overwhelmed across a similar timeframe anyway. The only way to actually fix the problem is to get the R-value below 1, which requires mass vaccinations.

disambiguation 5y ago
I can't believe people still think herd immunity is possible. Delta. Omicron. Our technology sucks and is slow, we can't achieve R < 1 this way.
- manwe150 5y ago
  It can’t be all that bleak. The mRNA technology would let us inject omicron-specific boosters tomorrow, but then there is a lot of other safety hurdles that have to be met before it gets authorized and then distribution hurdles to convince people to take it… Mathematically, we will get to R=1 this way, some day or another, with some percentage of people getting it via illness and some via vaccination. The choice is still ours on how and when.
  - disambiguation 5y ago
    Take a look at history to see how bleak it can get. At this point I'm less worried about covid and more worried about the global rise in authoritarian trends.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations. Although there is still skepticism regarding duration of the protection.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      > At some point the classical ones are available that are not vector or mRNA vaccinations. So you say that at some stage there will be vaccines for COVID-19 that are not nMRA (Pfizer, Moderna) or Viral vector (AstraZeneca) Why? The people who are happy with vaccines are fairly happy with these vaccines and might refine them, but not about to dump them entirely for a different technique. in fact mRNA vaccines are the new hot thing. And the people who really aren't happy with these vaccines, will never be happy. They'll find a way to object. So what's the incentive for such a classical vaccine? Who's going to root for it?

oezi 5y ago

It is mentioned enough by the media. Thank you. But it seems strange to realize that people don't want to do a job where you have to watch people die like flies over the course of two to three weeks. No money in the world makes that acceptable for many. With the availability of the vaccines (at least in the developed world) this has become a pandemic of the uninformed know-it-alls ("Querdenker" = Crooked thinker, as they are call here). If you work on an ICU to rescue people that tell you that this is all a scam by the Pharma-Industrial Complex, you would want to quit. It is not the media's fault where we are now, nor are the politicians (entirely) to blame. At least half the blame should be frankly put on social media disinformation and the usual tabloid press (Springer/Bild) that fabricate Fox-News style lies.

ipaddr 5y ago
More money and better shifts and not firing unvaccinated would fill the gap.
- burntbridge 5y ago
  You can't have people who are not vaccinated working at a hospital. This has been known for years and has been practiced for years. Vaccinations prevent the spread of disease. Surely you aren't questioning this.
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Before the vaccine (less than a year ago) they prevented the spread by using n95 masks and ppe. Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Knowing that the point of the vaccine is to prevent serious illness in the person receiving it. I struggle to understand why you would not even question how important they are in that setting unless you are worried they have dropped that extra safety component.
    - burntbridge 5y ago
      >Knowing that the vaccine doesn't prevent the person from getting and spreading covid. Vaccines reduce the risk of spreading the virus. People who are vaccinated are less likely to get seriously ill. This absolutely doesn't mean you won't die if you are vaccinated. Think seat belts in car accidents. It is all about reducing risk. On mass, at population levels, this means ICU have capacity to take in other seriously ill people. If ICUs are full and there is a plane crash or whatever where many people are seriously injured we are screwed.

Krasnol 5y ago

> So true and not mentioned enough by the media. This is nonsense. The topic has been in the news almost from the beginning of the crisis. The government is being constantly criticised for that. Why do you people repeat this? It's a lie. The fact that this topic is now being used by anti-vaxxers to cloud their anti-social behaviour and shift the growing anger of the vaccinated population away from them is ridiculous. There are two issues here and stacking hospital beds and personal would not make anti-vaxxers better in any way.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
daddylongstroke 5y ago
Why are the vaccinated so threatened by the non-vaccinated in Germany? Why the anger? Why the fear?
- Krasnol 5y ago
  Have you been locked up somewhere for the last 2 years or are you trolling me?
  - daddylongstroke 5y ago
    Not locked up. My wife, and most of our friends are either RNs, MDs, PAs, etc. We've had COVID. Now my wife is dealing directly with people who are dealing with adverse reactions to the vaccines they took (many of them nurses and doctors themselves experiencing neurological symptoms continuing for months and months at a time, and not allowed to speak about it for fear of losing their licensure). I only ask because it seems unreasonable to me to fear a virus that only meaningfully impacts .3% to .5% of your population. So, why not answer? Why are you afraid of the unvaccinated?
    - Krasnol 5y ago
      This is utter conspiracy bullshit. Neither would anyone lose their license about reporting side effects nor are those in any way so prevalent that your wife would be dealing with multiple amounts of them nor are they in any way close to as severe as the effects of COVID and long COVID. You're lying and the fact that you seriously think any sane person would believe this is both hilarious and sad as it's a very beautiful example of this covidioten movement we have to deal with.

jashmatthews 5y ago

In Germany, the majority of the cases are from unvaccinated people getting sick and infecting other people https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/ https://rocs.hu-berlin.de/publication/maier-2021-germany/

cqadt 5y ago
That is one paper from a couple of postdocs.
- marton78 5y ago
  As are pretty much all papers ever written
incrudible 5y ago
Never trust a model whose parameters you did not pull out of your own ass.

burntbridge 5y ago

I'm sure what you are saying is true but it doesn't really address the problem at hand. The bird has flown the coup and now action needs to be taken to save lives. Absolutely agree with you about hospital/medical resourcing though, we have the same situation in Australia. In the name of efficiency these services get paired to the bone, and we have no capacity to respond to unusual events. The Neo liberal worldview posits that redundancy is bad. I think Western countries in general are suffering from this Anorexia. It cripples innovation as well.

raxxorrax 5y ago
What would save lives would be a lockdown again.

Klemotio 5y ago

And what did you to help out? Did you suddenly switch your job to become a nurse? How do you think we would have been able to ramp up everything while in a pandemic?