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It's a fair point re: strain on hospitals, but The Atlantic could do without the hysteria and clickbait headlines. They undermine their credibility with nonsens
by tharne 5y ago
It's a fair point re: strain on hospitals, but The Atlantic could do without the hysteria and clickbait headlines. They undermine their credibility with nonsense like that.
Hospitals are definitely under a lot of stress at the moment, but that's hardly the same thing as a health-care system "crumbling".
- xhkkffbf 5y agoI really gave up on the Atlantic when they titled one article, "Georgia's Experiment with Human Sacrifice." What they meant is that someone was taking an approach to COVID that they didn't like.
- copo233 5y agoRitual human sacrifice could alternatively be described as someone taking an approach to religion that you don't like.
- kamranjon 5y agoThe title of the article is: “Omicron Isn’t Mild for the Health-Care System” - which seems like a fair shake to me. The hacker news submitted title is the clickbait hysteria you are attributing to the Atlantic.
- Wiseacre 5y agoThe first sentence is "When a health-care system crumbles, this is what it looks like."
- RGamma 5y agoWhat title would you prefer?
- tharne 5y agoNone, this topic has been written about to death for almost two years now and, as important as it may be, there's nothing new left to say about it. There's no shortage of interesting and newsworthy things going on in the world, we don't need to keep recycling the same few stories.
- RGamma 5y ago(Life-saving) COVID-related ICU utilization is highly dynamic wrt infection rates with exacerbations such as this article mentions, so this topic never becomes old. In fact indifference to current trends may negatively influence social distancing behavior and sequelae, so it still seems worth reporting.
- barbazoo 5y ago> Hospitals are definitely under a lot of stress at the moment, but that's hardly the same thing as a health-care system "crumbling". What would you call it then? People not getting the care they need and expect, compound effects over time. How is that not crumbling?
- tharne 5y agoIf you get stuck in a traffic jam on a Friday afternoon before a holiday weekend, you don't claim that the highway system is "crumbling". Sometimes you have a temporary surge in the demand for something - that happens. We don't build anything in society to accommodate a worst case scenario, as nice as it would be, it's just not practical. So to answer your question, I would say that the hospitals are currently over capacity.
- barbazoo 5y agoWhat you're not realizing is that there are people unnecessarily dying. So yes the system is crumbling. When I'm in a traffic jam I still get to my destination eventually.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoCrumbling is a metaphor so of course it is up to some interpretation. For me, the connotation is degradation or destruction that is not temporary.
- barbazoo 5y agoI guess you're technically right then. I'm glad we figured this out /s
- jeffrallen 5y agoDude, RTFA. The author is explaining that in a complex system, the signs of failure are hidden by the complexity, but it's still there anyway. A HN reader should understand this. Imagine if the headline was "Why your performance monitoring system should alarm on a 1% increase in the 4th standard deviation of your backend API latency measurement". You'd up ote without even taking it, wouldn't you?