10 ms·

I can't wait until public opinion seems to catch on to the fact that we will never eliminate covid. It blows my mind that we see 100% vaccinated universities go

by toolz 5y ago

I can't wait until public opinion seems to catch on to the fact that we will never eliminate covid. It blows my mind that we see 100% vaccinated universities going back to online-only learning. What exactly are they waiting on?

tjs8rj 5y ago
This is what a liability state looks like. Nobody gets sued for following the CDC, that same CDC that says you should never eat raw sushi or rare steak
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >that same CDC that says you should never eat raw sushi Pretty good advice in my opinion. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33095945 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33095945
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
>What exactly are they waiting on? Public opinion.
- SamPatt 5y ago
  Imagine running an organization based on public opinion, especially an opinion so wide as the whole internet. Groupthink is so dangerous.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Considering the details of the business they're in I don't think they have much choice other than to chart the course that enrages the fewest people even if that course is non-optimal.
- dfxm12 5y ago
  If federal law makers cared about public opinion, they'd have declassified marijuanna as a schedule 1 drug [0]. They also would not have done the recent weapons deal with Saudi Arabia [1]. 0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-holds-record-high.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-... 1 - https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12/7/a-strong-majority-of-voters-oppose-the-us-arms-sale-to-saudi-arabia https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12/7/a-strong-majo...
dontblink 5y ago
Normalcy. Right now everything is taken with an abundance of caution. Once stabilization occurs, normalcy will return (even if it's changed).
- azekai 5y ago
- toolz 5y ago
  I'm not sure how you can suggest there's any caution here. At least not with regards to the students. They are a low risk category with 100% vaccination rate and their risk of losing out on many of the important aspects of college are being disregarded. This is not what caution looks like.
paganel 5y ago
The public opinion around me (I live in Eastern Europe) does seem to have caught on to that fact, I mean the normal people, the problem is the media that, even here, keeps treating this like a thing that we could eventually get rid of.
katmannthree 5y ago
There are many places where that's a perfectly rational decision. COVID was never going to be completely managed by states less than willing to take draconian measures, the purpose soft-lockdowns was instead to lighten the load on our healthcare system so that we didn't need to invest in field hospitals and a bunch of field-trained doctors and nurses. If we had done that instead not only would the optics be worse (not just many more people dying, think front page photos of them dying in muddy tents), it would also dilute the market capture of the existing entrenched healthcare system.
- toolz 5y ago
  Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden? Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems. In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet.
  - katmannthree 5y ago
    > In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet. Yes, the issue there is sociopathic political maneuvering rather than an actual lack of national resources which could have been used to help our society in its time of need. > Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden? In the early days of covid it was irresponsible spring breakers spreading covid at destinations like Florida and then back home a week later. These days, look for areas with small purple cities surrounded by large red counties. As far as personal experiences go a couple Eastern states and the Pacific Northwest have issues with hospitals being literally over capacity. Many healthcare workers have been pushed past their breaking points and the national guard has been (and still is) providing manpower at the hospital next to my state's capitol (which is located next to a handful of universities). As other surrounding state's healthcare systems were overwhelmed with delta waves those states denied noncritical care and eventually sent patients out to my state. The collapse of the healthcare system is an issue for old people on vents and also a huge issue for college kids when their parents and professors up and die (caused a huge issue at one of the colleges here when a particularly irreplaceable professor passed away) and/or there are no hospital beds for them and there's a year plus waitlist on the mental health services they need now more than ever. College kids are a covid sink since they generally suffer only mildly from covid yet spread it rapidly due to their social habits and environment. The college kids are not the demographic wrecking the healthcare system, but they still spread covid and are affected by covid in their communities. Asking them to stay home to prevent spreading infections isn't that big a deal. > Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? Because we've pushed them to the breaking point rather than supporting them. Some died, some retired, some straight up left the field. Back in June of 2020 the cops had no shortage of riot gear and were always able to dig up more crowd gas, meanwhile doctors and nurses had to reuse contaminated PPE for months while a bunch of supply chain fuckery played itself out. How do you think that feels as a doctor, watching a shipment of PPE your state paid for and imported for you get confiscated by the feds and put into a big pile to get sold back to the highest bidder? How do you think it feels to notice how the police can suppress riots for months on end with endless tear gas and yet you get one N95 mask every two weeks even though you spend your entire day around people dying of covid? > How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? See the above, we chose to stress existing resources instead of training, building, and deploying new ones. We don't have new hospitals, we don't have nationwide boot camps to get young civically minded people the skills needed to help support society. > These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems. The indicators that we're lacking capacity are the shortage of replacement workers, the shortage of hospital beds during covid waves, the insane wait times to see specialists, and finally the countless secondary deaths caused by covid patients taking up resources that could've been used by someone close to me with once-treatable cancer whose care was delayed until it metastasized and who will now die a slow, painful, and what should have been preventable death in the next couple of years.
davidw 5y ago
> What exactly are they waiting on? The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave. Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.
- johnisgood 5y ago
  We reduced the number of surgeries dramatically around the whole country, but it has nothing to do with hospital capacity nor shortage of any sort.
- toolz 5y ago
  Elective procedures were mandated to stop by policy - not due to capacity constraints. Believe it or not, but 2020 hospital capacity was lower than projected using projections before anyone knew what covid even was.
  - davidw 5y ago
    COVID patients completely overran the hospital where I live. We're a not so big city that serves a lot of really rural areas. The ICU was full. The regular hospital was full.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      A lot of rural hospitals were closed last year[0] [0]https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2020-13-were-in-the-south/ https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2...
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  If hospital capacity is such a concern, why has there been just about zero effort in spinning up some kind of capacity to deal with Covid? Wasn't that the entire rationale of these lockdowns in the first place? To build capacity for covid? Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.
Johnny555 5y ago
What exactly are they waiting on? Probably waiting on hospitals to be fully staffed and less busy. My sibling moved from being a pedatric nurse to a non-patient care position (not at a hospital). She'd been nearly permanently removed from her pediatric role and moved to be on the front lines for COVID care for over a year with no relief in sight. She spent 2 years in Iraq and said that this is much more tiring and exasperating since she's treating people that largely could have avoided being in the hospital at all. Her hospital has been cancelling elective procedures, so everyone is suffering from the COVID wave.
jimkleiber 5y ago
I wonder if the approach is similar to managing herpes. We don't yet know how to eliminate it and yet we believe that if someone has a current outbreak (visible sores, etc) than they should avoid sexual contact with others so they don't spread it...until it subsides again. I may not have all the details right on that, just seems the approach some are taking to covid is the "yes we won't eliminate it and yet we can try to minimize exposure during times of high infectiousness."

by toolz 5y ago

tjs8rj 5y ago

This is what a liability state looks like. Nobody gets sued for following the CDC, that same CDC that says you should never eat raw sushi or rare steak

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>that same CDC that says you should never eat raw sushi Pretty good advice in my opinion. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33095945 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-33095945

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

>What exactly are they waiting on? Public opinion.

SamPatt 5y ago
Imagine running an organization based on public opinion, especially an opinion so wide as the whole internet. Groupthink is so dangerous.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Considering the details of the business they're in I don't think they have much choice other than to chart the course that enrages the fewest people even if that course is non-optimal.
dfxm12 5y ago
If federal law makers cared about public opinion, they'd have declassified marijuanna as a schedule 1 drug [0]. They also would not have done the recent weapons deal with Saudi Arabia [1]. 0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-holds-record-high.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-... 1 - https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12/7/a-strong-majority-of-voters-oppose-the-us-arms-sale-to-saudi-arabia https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12/7/a-strong-majo...

dontblink 5y ago

Normalcy. Right now everything is taken with an abundance of caution. Once stabilization occurs, normalcy will return (even if it's changed).

azekai 5y ago
toolz 5y ago
I'm not sure how you can suggest there's any caution here. At least not with regards to the students. They are a low risk category with 100% vaccination rate and their risk of losing out on many of the important aspects of college are being disregarded. This is not what caution looks like.

paganel 5y ago

The public opinion around me (I live in Eastern Europe) does seem to have caught on to that fact, I mean the normal people, the problem is the media that, even here, keeps treating this like a thing that we could eventually get rid of.

katmannthree 5y ago

There are many places where that's a perfectly rational decision. COVID was never going to be completely managed by states less than willing to take draconian measures, the purpose soft-lockdowns was instead to lighten the load on our healthcare system so that we didn't need to invest in field hospitals and a bunch of field-trained doctors and nurses. If we had done that instead not only would the optics be worse (not just many more people dying, think front page photos of them dying in muddy tents), it would also dilute the market capture of the existing entrenched healthcare system.

toolz 5y ago
Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden? Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems. In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet.
- katmannthree 5y ago
  > In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet. Yes, the issue there is sociopathic political maneuvering rather than an actual lack of national resources which could have been used to help our society in its time of need. > Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden? In the early days of covid it was irresponsible spring breakers spreading covid at destinations like Florida and then back home a week later. These days, look for areas with small purple cities surrounded by large red counties. As far as personal experiences go a couple Eastern states and the Pacific Northwest have issues with hospitals being literally over capacity. Many healthcare workers have been pushed past their breaking points and the national guard has been (and still is) providing manpower at the hospital next to my state's capitol (which is located next to a handful of universities). As other surrounding state's healthcare systems were overwhelmed with delta waves those states denied noncritical care and eventually sent patients out to my state. The collapse of the healthcare system is an issue for old people on vents and also a huge issue for college kids when their parents and professors up and die (caused a huge issue at one of the colleges here when a particularly irreplaceable professor passed away) and/or there are no hospital beds for them and there's a year plus waitlist on the mental health services they need now more than ever. College kids are a covid sink since they generally suffer only mildly from covid yet spread it rapidly due to their social habits and environment. The college kids are not the demographic wrecking the healthcare system, but they still spread covid and are affected by covid in their communities. Asking them to stay home to prevent spreading infections isn't that big a deal. > Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? Because we've pushed them to the breaking point rather than supporting them. Some died, some retired, some straight up left the field. Back in June of 2020 the cops had no shortage of riot gear and were always able to dig up more crowd gas, meanwhile doctors and nurses had to reuse contaminated PPE for months while a bunch of supply chain fuckery played itself out. How do you think that feels as a doctor, watching a shipment of PPE your state paid for and imported for you get confiscated by the feds and put into a big pile to get sold back to the highest bidder? How do you think it feels to notice how the police can suppress riots for months on end with endless tear gas and yet you get one N95 mask every two weeks even though you spend your entire day around people dying of covid? > How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? See the above, we chose to stress existing resources instead of training, building, and deploying new ones. We don't have new hospitals, we don't have nationwide boot camps to get young civically minded people the skills needed to help support society. > These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems. The indicators that we're lacking capacity are the shortage of replacement workers, the shortage of hospital beds during covid waves, the insane wait times to see specialists, and finally the countless secondary deaths caused by covid patients taking up resources that could've been used by someone close to me with once-treatable cancer whose care was delayed until it metastasized and who will now die a slow, painful, and what should have been preventable death in the next couple of years.

davidw 5y ago

> What exactly are they waiting on? The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave. Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.

johnisgood 5y ago
We reduced the number of surgeries dramatically around the whole country, but it has nothing to do with hospital capacity nor shortage of any sort.
toolz 5y ago
Elective procedures were mandated to stop by policy - not due to capacity constraints. Believe it or not, but 2020 hospital capacity was lower than projected using projections before anyone knew what covid even was.
- davidw 5y ago
  COVID patients completely overran the hospital where I live. We're a not so big city that serves a lot of really rural areas. The ICU was full. The regular hospital was full.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    A lot of rural hospitals were closed last year[0] [0]https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2020-13-were-in-the-south/ https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2...
spookthesunset 5y ago
If hospital capacity is such a concern, why has there been just about zero effort in spinning up some kind of capacity to deal with Covid? Wasn't that the entire rationale of these lockdowns in the first place? To build capacity for covid? Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.

Johnny555 5y ago

What exactly are they waiting on? Probably waiting on hospitals to be fully staffed and less busy. My sibling moved from being a pedatric nurse to a non-patient care position (not at a hospital). She'd been nearly permanently removed from her pediatric role and moved to be on the front lines for COVID care for over a year with no relief in sight. She spent 2 years in Iraq and said that this is much more tiring and exasperating since she's treating people that largely could have avoided being in the hospital at all. Her hospital has been cancelling elective procedures, so everyone is suffering from the COVID wave.

jimkleiber 5y ago

I wonder if the approach is similar to managing herpes. We don't yet know how to eliminate it and yet we believe that if someone has a current outbreak (visible sores, etc) than they should avoid sexual contact with others so they don't spread it...until it subsides again. I may not have all the details right on that, just seems the approach some are taking to covid is the "yes we won't eliminate it and yet we can try to minimize exposure during times of high infectiousness."