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At this point I assume it's clear to everyone that all humans will be exposed to COVID. Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system wi

by eric_b 5y ago

At this point I assume it's clear to everyone that all humans will be exposed to COVID. Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system will have to sort it out. The biggest story of COVID that no one is talking about is the absolute failure at all levels (political, medical establishment, etc) to increase hospital capacity. We are in year 2 of a global pandemic and, at least where I am, there has been a reduction in ICU staff, beds and hospital capacity more generally. Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen. Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.

Zigurd 5y ago
> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen. Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Also, you fail to understand that capacity is down because of burnout, so advocating against vaccination, especially for health care workers, is hypocritical in the most cynical way. You are advocating for the onset of chaos.
- yucky 5y ago
  > capacity is down because of burnout ...and mandates. The stories in the media only capture the firings, but a ton more left before getting fired, simply because they had no desire to be fired.
altcognito 5y ago
> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen. OR, we've filtered to the people that actually believe in medical science, ones that are willing to do what needs to be done to prevent the spread of contagious disease. > Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame. Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your freedom ends where my nose begins.
- zeven7 5y ago
  Devils advocate: If these are people that work around sick people all the time, couldn't many of them have already contracted and defeated Covid before the vaccines were available? Doesn't that offer a decent level of immunity (something close to what the vaccine offers)? And don't those people already have a good understanding of how Covid affects them individually? It's hard to argue such people need vaccines or else they don't "believe in medical science".
- noodles_nomore 5y ago
  I'm happy that you at least acknowledge that it's about belief.
- peteradio 5y ago
  Its going to affect how people view entering into the medical workforce when they effectively sign up for whatever the fuck medical experiments the government is pissing themselves about at the time.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    What medical experiments are you referring to? RNA vaccines didn't happen overnight, billions were spent to accelerate clinical trials, millions have been vaccinated and we don't see much of secondary effects.
    - native_samples 5y ago
      mRNA vaccines did basically happen overnight, yeah. As recently as 2017 they couldn't progress beyond animal trials because all mRNA based drugs became toxic after multiple doses. Better hope they nailed that problem, right? As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain". The trial participants had to report adverse events using an app that had a pre-set list of possible side effects, with no way to enter any others. The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market. The trials didn't measure hospitalization and couldn't show any improvement in mortality. Etc. Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years. Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.
walterbell 5y ago
Quebec offered $1 billion in incentives for their healthcare worker vax mandate -- and it still failed. Sep 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-plan-nursing-staffing-crisis-1.6186971 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-plan-nursing-... > The Quebec government has announced it will provide nurses with financial bonuses of up to $18,000 as part of its emergency plan to fix the staffing crisis in the province's health-care network ... the plan would cost close to $1 billion Nov 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/8346947/quebec-drops-vaccine-mandate-among-health-care-workers/ https://globalnews.ca/news/8346947/quebec-drops-vaccine-mand... > Quebec is backtracking on its enforced COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health-care workers, government officials announced Wednesday. After pushing back its deadline multiple times, Health Minister Christian Dubé said the province will abandon the measure altogether, as the health-care network can’t afford to lose the thousands of non-vaccinated employees. The loss of unvaccinated staff would have had a “devastating effect on the system,” according to the health ministry.
- disambiguation 5y ago
  > and it still failed Maybe because they set up the incentives poorly? > One nurse, who CBC agreed not to name because she is not authorized to speak to media, said the announcement will do nothing for her. The woman works part-time as an emergency room nurse on the night shift, but says she cannot afford to take on full-time work overnight because she is a single mother. "I'm penalized either way," she said, explaining that part-time nurses expect that they will still be forced to work overtime.
  - walterbell 5y ago
    Incentives failed to create a replacement workforce and enough workers refused the vax that they could not be replaced.
Glide 5y ago
There are a lot of things involved in increasing hospital capacity. One would be increasing the number of workers. With things like masks we were able to free up supply by allowing N95 construction masks to be used until other production can get up to speed. We don't exactly have a hidden cache of nurses and doctors that can be rallied upon a moment's notice. Now getting rid of the ones that can, and probably contracted COVID already does make zero sense.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
> Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system will have to sort it out. Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster. COVID is burning out workers everywhere, especially in the medical field. A lot of the quitting isn’t related to vax status, people are just tired and they don’t feel they get paid enough for the job they are doing. Hospital capacity will take years to increase. At least 4 to raise nurse/doctor class sizes, probably longer since you need to expand the training programs as well. We also already spend 18 percent of our GDP on healthcare, going to 30 percent is going to hurt, but if people don’t want to get vaccinated, maybe we can just charge them higher insurance premiums to make up for it?
- eric_b 5y ago
  > Hospital capacity will take years to increase No, not really. With trillions of dollars and 2 years there was absolutely plenty of time and resources to train more people and find new COVID-specific spaces. Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster. The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
  - johnchristopher 5y ago
    Why would have that worked when half of the US politicians still think it's a cold ?
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      Train the other half.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster. Nursing programs were already at capacity before COVID started, and doing a 2 year program is preconditioned on previous education (a 2 year AS degree in my state). > The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership. Said by every arm chair general ever.

by eric_b 5y ago

Zigurd 5y ago

> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen. Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Also, you fail to understand that capacity is down because of burnout, so advocating against vaccination, especially for health care workers, is hypocritical in the most cynical way. You are advocating for the onset of chaos.

yucky 5y ago
> capacity is down because of burnout ...and mandates. The stories in the media only capture the firings, but a ton more left before getting fired, simply because they had no desire to be fired.

altcognito 5y ago

> Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen. OR, we've filtered to the people that actually believe in medical science, ones that are willing to do what needs to be done to prevent the spread of contagious disease. > Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame. Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your freedom ends where my nose begins.

zeven7 5y ago
Devils advocate: If these are people that work around sick people all the time, couldn't many of them have already contracted and defeated Covid before the vaccines were available? Doesn't that offer a decent level of immunity (something close to what the vaccine offers)? And don't those people already have a good understanding of how Covid affects them individually? It's hard to argue such people need vaccines or else they don't "believe in medical science".
noodles_nomore 5y ago
I'm happy that you at least acknowledge that it's about belief.
peteradio 5y ago
Its going to affect how people view entering into the medical workforce when they effectively sign up for whatever the fuck medical experiments the government is pissing themselves about at the time.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  What medical experiments are you referring to? RNA vaccines didn't happen overnight, billions were spent to accelerate clinical trials, millions have been vaccinated and we don't see much of secondary effects.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    mRNA vaccines did basically happen overnight, yeah. As recently as 2017 they couldn't progress beyond animal trials because all mRNA based drugs became toxic after multiple doses. Better hope they nailed that problem, right? As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain". The trial participants had to report adverse events using an app that had a pre-set list of possible side effects, with no way to enter any others. The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market. The trials didn't measure hospitalization and couldn't show any improvement in mortality. Etc. Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years. Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.

walterbell 5y ago

Quebec offered $1 billion in incentives for their healthcare worker vax mandate -- and it still failed. Sep 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-plan-nursing-staffing-crisis-1.6186971 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-plan-nursing-... > The Quebec government has announced it will provide nurses with financial bonuses of up to $18,000 as part of its emergency plan to fix the staffing crisis in the province's health-care network ... the plan would cost close to $1 billion Nov 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/8346947/quebec-drops-vaccine-mandate-among-health-care-workers/ https://globalnews.ca/news/8346947/quebec-drops-vaccine-mand... > Quebec is backtracking on its enforced COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health-care workers, government officials announced Wednesday. After pushing back its deadline multiple times, Health Minister Christian Dubé said the province will abandon the measure altogether, as the health-care network can’t afford to lose the thousands of non-vaccinated employees. The loss of unvaccinated staff would have had a “devastating effect on the system,” according to the health ministry.

disambiguation 5y ago
> and it still failed Maybe because they set up the incentives poorly? > One nurse, who CBC agreed not to name because she is not authorized to speak to media, said the announcement will do nothing for her. The woman works part-time as an emergency room nurse on the night shift, but says she cannot afford to take on full-time work overnight because she is a single mother. "I'm penalized either way," she said, explaining that part-time nurses expect that they will still be forced to work overtime.
- walterbell 5y ago
  Incentives failed to create a replacement workforce and enough workers refused the vax that they could not be replaced.

Glide 5y ago

There are a lot of things involved in increasing hospital capacity. One would be increasing the number of workers. With things like masks we were able to free up supply by allowing N95 construction masks to be used until other production can get up to speed. We don't exactly have a hidden cache of nurses and doctors that can be rallied upon a moment's notice. Now getting rid of the ones that can, and probably contracted COVID already does make zero sense.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

> Get your vaccine or don't, but one way or another your immune system will have to sort it out. Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster. COVID is burning out workers everywhere, especially in the medical field. A lot of the quitting isn’t related to vax status, people are just tired and they don’t feel they get paid enough for the job they are doing. Hospital capacity will take years to increase. At least 4 to raise nurse/doctor class sizes, probably longer since you need to expand the training programs as well. We also already spend 18 percent of our GDP on healthcare, going to 30 percent is going to hurt, but if people don’t want to get vaccinated, maybe we can just charge them higher insurance premiums to make up for it?

eric_b 5y ago
> Hospital capacity will take years to increase No, not really. With trillions of dollars and 2 years there was absolutely plenty of time and resources to train more people and find new COVID-specific spaces. Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster. The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Why would have that worked when half of the US politicians still think it's a cold ?
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Train the other half.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  > Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster. Nursing programs were already at capacity before COVID started, and doing a 2 year program is preconditioned on previous education (a 2 year AS degree in my state). > The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership. Said by every arm chair general ever.