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Am I fucking crazy for not knowing what's going on any more? US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels l

• lk251 5y ago
  I don't think you're crazy or alone in thinking that way. As I said on my other comment, not only overall deaths but the frequent serious sequelae are concerning.
• fbrncci 5y ago
  Is Delta still dominant in the US? First time I am checking the US Covid stats in months, and it seems like both deaths and hospitalizations in the US are rising. The opposite is true for most of Europe, where omicron cases are rising exponentiallly, but deaths and hospitalizations are falling flat.
  • maxerickson 5y ago
    Omicron is dominant. Full vaccination is at about 65%, boosters are at about 25%, lower than much of Europe.
    • floxy 5y ago
      Percent of US Population At least Fully one dose Vaxed Boosted Total 75.4% 63.3% 39.5% Population ≥ 5 Years of Age 80.1% 67.3% Population ≥ 12 Years of Age 85.3% 72.1% Population ≥ 18 Years of Age 87.3% 73.8% 42.6% Population ≥ 65 Years of Age 95% 88.2% 62.7% https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-total-admin-rate-total https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#vaccinations_vacc-...
      • maxerickson 5y ago
        They say 83 million boosters given, which is ~25% of the population. They seem to be using a different denominator for the boosted number there (I guess the number of people eligible for the booster). It's reasonable to be measuring against eligibility when evaluating progress in administering boosters, but not being eligible for a booster doesn't really make someone less susceptible to infection, so it isn't the right thing to compare across countries.
    • dmoo 5y ago
      For reference Ireland • Fully vaccinated: 18+ years: 94.8% 12+ years: 92.8% • Booster / immunocompromised: 18+ years: 67.1%
  • IAmGraydon 5y ago
    It’s definitely strange that there’s such a disparity, and I assume it’s because there are differences in what is considered a “Covid death” in the US vs elsewhere.
    • christophilus 5y ago
      There’s that, and American obesity / general lack of health. (Just a guess.)
      • IAmGraydon 5y ago
        Maybe, but consider that 64% of adults in England are overweight. In the US it’s around 70%. Not that big of a difference.
  • rdedev 5y ago
    It might be better to look statewide for the US. I believe omicron is just getting started in some places. Cases in NJ are dipping down currently and my college is planning to open up by feb
  • peteradio 5y ago
    How deaths are counted really does matter. If we aren't accounting for the fact that many people are incidentally tested for Covid prior to their death of something else then that is going to be difficult to interpret in the middle of the Omicron wave.
• 80386 5y ago
  > I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway. One year, not two. There was never any hope of containing COVID. It was endemic by the end of 2019. Individual countries had a chance of avoiding it with border controls that no Western country has the political will to implement - but the will to implement an indefinite policy of sakoku no longer exists anywhere. Since COVID was globally endemic before official sources even acknowledged human-to-human transmission, there was never any hope of not taking the bullet eventually - although in theory "eventually" means "until the next Commodore Perry". A reasonable strategy would be to slow the spread of the virus to study vaccines, treatment protocols, and the possibility of long-term sequelae, and to build medical capacity, and then, at some point, declare good-enough preliminary results and (modulo medical capacity concerns) let it rip. Letting it rip while there are still such vast unknown unknowns is irresponsible and only potentially justifiable in hindsight - Anders Tegnell looks good now, but it could've been a lot worse. But the propaganda machine can't turn on a dime, so the measures lasted much longer than they had any reason to, at least in the parts of the "Free World" that believe in respecting established authority qua established authority.
• api 5y ago
  Over 90% of the people in the hospitals are unvaccinated.
  • IgorPartola 5y ago
    In my state it is about 57%: https://portal.ct.gov/Office-of-the-Governor/News/Press-Releases/2022/01-2022/Governor-Lamont-Coronavirus-Update-January-21 https://portal.ct.gov/Office-of-the-Governor/News/Press-Rele...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • vixen99 5y ago
    A statistic like this is meaningless unless qualified and supported with a link to a reliable source. All hospitals in the US, UK, European countries, South America, world?
    • SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
      It's also meaningless unless compared to the population. "90% of the people in this hospital for COVID today are unvaccinated" is a very different statement when, for hypothetical examples, - 90% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is same as general population. - 10% of the people in the local area area are unvaccinated: Hospital population is mostly drawn from the unvaccinated. And points in-between, and the other way (what if - for sake of example only - 95% of local people are unvaccinated?). And then there are further confounding effects - what if unvaccinated people are younger and than average, as vaccines are given preferentially to older people who are more likely to require a hospital visit in normal times.
• lotsofpulp 5y ago
  It is mostly unvaccinated people choosing to not get vaccinated, which people have lost patience for, and I cannot blame them.
  • HarryHirsch 5y ago
    That's coming from someone who is working from home, isn't it? There's also those of us who have exposure to the public and are reaching old ago, and we have lost all patience for the sunshine-and-unicorn crowd.
    • lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I mostly WFH, but have to visit government offices and construction sites. I have 2 kids in daycare though, so I might as well be living in a petri dish of viruses.
  • xfitm3 5y ago
    • Ensorceled 5y ago
      This is identical to saying "I'm just pissing in my corner of the pool" or "I'm just polluting my own land". Unless you are staying home and getting food delivered?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • guerrilla 5y ago
      You'll be taking up a hospital place for people who can't get vaccinated. That seems pretty dangerous. https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=30036474&goto=item%3Fid%3D30036325%2330036474 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=30036474&goto=item%3Fi...
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
• meibo 5y ago
  I had to deal with a family member not being able to get a place in the hospital this week, even though they would have otherwise(covid unrelated) - taking care of them at home is nearly impossible. No one cares until it affects them.
  • 01100011 5y ago
    We have the same issue, but the person chose not to get vaccinated. Hopefully she makes it because she is otherwise a wonderful person but if it happens, well, we tried to tell her.
    • ThunderSizzle 5y ago
      • Operyl 5y ago
        Not the poster you replied to, but: The very very few, of course I’d feel sorry for her but I’d not have made a different decision in pushing for vaccination. Any treatment could have adverse reactions, it’s just how it goes.
        • glogla 5y ago
          I think there's a difference in feeling bad for someone with good intentions who got unlucky (vaccine adverse effect) and someone who active tried to make to world a worse place, fucked around and found out (antivaxxe). This whole pandemic made me realize that Paradox of Tolerance is much more general - there is also Paradox of Empathy and Paradox of Kindness and bunch others.
  • wccrawford 5y ago
    >No one cares until it affects them. While many don't care until it affects them, that is not even close to universally true. I was surprised at the number of people who didn't care, and it seems to be about 50%, but characterizing everyone that way is incredibly unfair to all the people who worked tirelessly to try to convince people to get the vaccine.
• freshntasty 5y ago
  Yes, we've wasted two years of everybody's life. Let's not waste any more.
• maxerickson 5y ago
  Pandemic fatigue + a very contagious variant that is less virulent. A lower rate of people are getting hospitalized (and often require a lower level of care), but the massive number of people getting infected is still driving high hospital utilization. Omicron is being called 'mild', but it's not mild for a lot of people in absolute terms (even though it may be milder compared to what earlier variants might have been for that individual).
• anovikov 5y ago
  Because now there are no restrictions to speak of left and it can't go much worse. No ground for apocalyptic scenarios anymore. Also, it's entirely up to people themselves if they want to be protected or not: Omicron is so transmissive, it doesn't matter for transmission if people are vaccinated or not - whatever impact it has on transmission is of little consequence - everyone is going to get infected, anyway (maybe a few weeks later but it doesn't matter at all). On the other hand, vaccines are universally available, and free, for a very long time now. Together it means that if you are unvaccinated, it's on one hand, only your own fault, and on the other hand, only your problem - effectively you no longer endanger anyone but yourself by staying unvaccinated (big difference from what it was a year ago). Which means, there is no point for anyone but unvaccinated themselves suffering. If you got the vaccine, Omicron is about as dangerous as flu, and no one closes economy because of flu. Almost all unvaccinated are Republicans and Democratic administration is in power...
  • aurelianito 5y ago
    In order for that to be true, unvaccinated people should not be hospitalized.
    • anovikov 5y ago
      In the U.S. (for the better or not) there are economic mechanisms that help making that the case...
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        What are those? EMTALA seems like it would cover hospitalization. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_and_Active_Labor_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Medical_Treatment_an...
    • t0bia_s 5y ago
      Just two year of propaganda to be so hateful online. Do you know what hapened in history when segregation was main gonverment propaganda? Just stop it.
• akmarinov 5y ago
  I meant for Ireland, they have a good vaccination rate and lower hospitalization rate in the latest wave. For US probably a couple more waves and it’ll go through the unvaccinated.
• geoduck14 5y ago
  Here's a fun youbtube video that covers this topic: https://youtu.be/Lf-8rEK63eg https://youtu.be/Lf-8rEK63eg
• polote 5y ago
  Well there are people dying everyday for any number of reasons. About 10k per day in the US. If you are at risk of dying from covid and you didn't get vaccinated it is kinda your fault now. And if you are vaccinated and dying from covid, well there is not much more you could have done.
  • ryanbrunner 5y ago
    There's people who are at risk of dying from COVID even when vaccinated. For many immunocompromised people, the vaccine has limited effect.
    • aurelianito 5y ago
      These people also die from the flu and common cold. We cannot stop the world for them.
      • ryanbrunner 5y ago
        Public health has also traditionally worked in the interest of high-risk and vulnerable people. With COVID it looks like we'll largely abandon that - for not completely illogical reasons, obviously public health has a cost, but I think it's important to acknowledge that this is giving up and not business as usual.
        • aurelianito 5y ago
          It is business as usual. They will be in a similar situation as they were before the pandemic.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• scop 5y ago
  1. This isn’t the same virus as at the start of the pandemic. 2. There is a treatment protocol for COVID, unlike at the start of the pandemic. 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity. 4. There is now a large portion of the population that has natural immunity. 5. It should be abundantly clear that case counts is no longer a meaningful metric. 6. Covid is a disease that has markedly different effects based upon the host’s age, medical condition, etc. There is no equivalent level of risk. 7. Most of the population, think working class and kids, cannot sustain continued lockdown conditions without serious mental/economic effects. They don’t have the privilege of the laptop class to just dial in from an office. 8. It should be clear that universally containing an aerosol virus like COVID is impossible. What is possible is targeted containment, I.e. keeping nursing homes under more precautions. Re hospital capacity, Hospitals run close to their limit. I have been in and out of the medical system my whole life and can assure that delays, cancellations, etc are nothing new. Is there strain during the new waves? Of course. But these are waves and they will come and pass. As well perhaps firing unvaccinated nurses wasn’t a good idea? People can choose to isolate during the waves if they want, but if they feel they feel like they have no need to (vaccine immunity, natural immunity). And as a father of small children, I cannot in good conscience continue to deny them a childhood for a virus that they themselves have extremely little risk of. The human brain is only developing during its childhood years once.
  • bartread 5y ago
    > 3. There are now vaccines. There is now a large portion of the population that has vaccine immunity. Yeeeeesss. The vaccines are beneficial in preventing serious illness but it's important not to overstate their efficacy. As I write this I have COVID, which I caught from my girlfriend. We're not sure where she got it, but she started showing symptoms and tested positive last Saturday. I started showing symptoms on Monday but didn't test positive until Wednesday. We're both double vaxxed and boosted. In my case I had 2 x AZ and 1 x Moderna. Can't remember off the top of my head what she had. Both of us are in good health. Neither of us have underlying health conditions. She's fortunately started feeling a lot better now but I've really only just passed rock bottom. I feel much better than yesterday but still far from well. The internet is full of stories of people who were all, "I had COVID: it lasted 4 days and was no big deal," and then a week later are either in ICU or dead, so I'm not taking anything for granted. Seeming to get better and then getting rapidly worse, or having it linger on for a surprisingly long time, is something of a hallmark of COVID. (Of course, there are also plenty of people for whom it really is no big deal.) Probably I won't become seriously ill or die, but COVID is no picnic, and if you had the choice of getting it versus not getting it I'd advise against it. Even with Omicron, if a large enough proportion of the population were infected at one time, our healthcare systems would collapse under the pressure. Whilst I don't like to credit the current UK government with terribly much intelligence, our experience in this country has been that it has required some degree of careful management to avoid that scenario playing out. Even still, our death rate is high compared with many other nations. There's also the fact that the picture is very different across different countries: for example, the situation in Ireland is very different to the UK. TO BE CLEAR: Unless you have a very clear and specific medical reason not to, you should get vaccinated, but let's not pretend the vaccines are a panacea. That's misinformation as much as it is to state that they're completely unnecessary, that COVID is some sort of elaborate hoax, or - and I don't have enough faces or palms to adequately express my despair at this perspective - that they're some sort of government conspiracy to track us all with nanobots.
• adnmcq999 5y ago
  Bingo
• markphip 5y ago
  I wouldn't say I am "okay with it" but definitely "tired of it". Myself and my family all have the boosters. As long as transmission is high and masks are recommended we will wear masks. Other than that though, my preference would be that there are few other restrictions in place. What I am tired of is waiting for everyone else to get the vaccine and wear a mask. At this point it seems like a lost cause and not worth my effort to spend energy on. I still have a lot of sympathy for healthcare workers and really anyone else that has to work in a highly public setting where they are at higher risk of exposure.
• refurb 5y ago
  For the most part we did stumble our way to this point, but nobody could predict the outcome. After two years and now 4 shots being discussed it’s clearly apparent:1) people will still get infected, 2) despite the lower risk of death with vaccines, plenty will still die, 3) we can’t keep borrowing money and giving to people when we shutdown their businesses. And I feel like the protests in Australia, Canada, US, Europe are making it pretty clear people aren’t willing to make major sacrifices for another year, or two or three. Far smarter to pretend this was the plan all along then watch people blatantly disregard your rules.
  • ricardobayes 5y ago
    Spain plans to treat covid as endemic after 6th (current) wave is over, and it's already peaked. Rolling out vaccines and paxlovid is a 'science win'.
• cm2187 5y ago
  If you look at the UK which was probably hit earlier by Omicron, hospitalisations are nowhere all time high and decreasing [1] despite covid cases having blown up previous records [2]. [1] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare [2] https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases
• throwaway6734 5y ago
  >US hospitalizations are at an all time high, 2000 people are still dying every day, and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened? Imo the only thing that really matters is the hospitalization rate of the vaccinated. If it's near bad flu numbers, then there's no more concern
  • tzs 5y ago
    Hospitalization rates for the vaccinated are an order of magnitude lower than the rates for the unvaccinated, and death rates more so. However, even though I'm fully vaccinated and boosted so personally have no reason to fear COVID from the point of view of landing in the hospital or dying directly from COVID (and all my friends and family are in a similar position) it is still an indirect concern because the unvaccinated are taking up hospital resources that I might need. Even in my county in the US, which has been in the bottom quarter for case, death, and hospitalization rates in my state, which has been in the bottom 5-10 states for all of those statistics for the entire pandemic, there are enough unvaccinated people in the hospital now with COVID that hospitals are almost unable to take new patients. Omicron looks like it is peaking here, so it will probably be OK to go ahead and have my heart attack or get hit by a drunk driver without worrying about whether I'll be able to get treatment, but there are a heck of a lot of places in the US right now where this is not the case. The good news is that after omicron, enough of the unvaccinated will have some immunity via omicron that it should bring their hospitalization rates down enough that it is no longer a problem. That's when we reach the "it can be treated like a a cold or flu from a public health perspective" stage. A recent NTY covid briefing email looked at the data from places that are ahead of the US on the omicron curve, and that's what they concluded.
    • throwaway6734 5y ago
      >it is still an indirect concern because the unvaccinated are taking up hospital resources that I might need. The solution to this is to bump the unvaccinated to the lowest priority of hospitals. If beds are full they should be removed from the hospital.
      • 5y ago
• melling 5y ago
  Wouldn’t the number be 80-90% less if people chose to be vaccinated and boosted? If we didn’t have vaccines how much larger would the numbers be?
• xienze 5y ago
  > US hospitalizations are at an all time high Well, about that. A few governors have admitted what has been known by “conspiracy theorists” for the past two years: that included in the count of Covid hospitalizations are people who come to the hospital for something else entirely and happen to test positive [0]: > Officials from New York City-based NYU Langone Health told The New York Times in a Jan. 4 report that about 65 percent of its COVID-19 patients were "incidentally" found to be infected after admission for other reasons. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked hospitals to adjust their reporting on COVID-19 hospitalizations beginning Jan. 4 to make the distinction between those admitted for the virus as their primary condition and those who incidentally test positive. ... > "We have a few patients in the hospital for COVID, but not many, thank goodness," Dr. Jha tweeted. "More common on our service is folks admitted with COVID. That is, they came to the hospital for something else and found to have COVID." So the count numbers have been exaggerated for who knows how long. An accident, I’m sure. 0: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcomes/hospitals-see-more-patients-with-covid-19-vs-for-covid-19.html https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/patient-safety-outcome...
  • lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I believe leaders also have an incentive to muddy waters because wage shortages are causing hospital capacity to fall, but it is easier for them to claim COVID. It would be nice if we were able to see the change in how many nurse/technician hours were available over the past few years.
    • zdragnar 5y ago
      It also didn't help that after two years of being called "essential workers" and constantly exposed, hospital staff were told to get the vaccine or take a hike. The principle of the matter pissed off a lot of nurses my wife knows, whether they were vaccinated, naturally immune or not at all. To top it off, healthy unvaccinated nurses can't work, but capacity is so low some hospitals are asking covid positive nurses to come back to work before they fully recover or had the full quarantine period.
• tagoregrtst 5y ago
  “US hospitalizations are at an all time high,” How do you know that? My question, really, is how do you know what you know and are not being misled? (A la WMD to use an easy, universally understood, example?) “2000 people are still dying every day,” No, they’re not. According to the CDC (why do I trust them?) its currently 500/day [1]. It hasn't been > 2000 since September in the midst of the Delta spike. But even before I looked at the CDC I doubted your claim because: - The vast majority of adult Americans are vaccinated. (>70%?). Its far greater in the vulnerable population. - Of the unvaxxed, a great number of them are already recovered (or dead) - You agree, this leaves a significantly reduced pool of people for the Grim Reaper to harvest. Therefore, 2000 dead/day in January 2022 would have been far far worse than the all time high of 25 000/ week (>3000/day) we reached in Jan last year because the normalizing population was much higher then. For your figure to be correct then, omicron would have to be, not just more contagious (it is), but a spectacularly more deadly variant than Delta instead of being relatively benign. “and it feels like everybody is just okay with that now. What happened?” We’re not OK with it, we’ve made peace and learned to live with something that has become endemic and will never go away. 2 years of pandemic implies 1/40th of an average lifespan. Thats not insignificant. But it gets worse 2 years is 66% of my toddler’s life. A toddler that doesnt know what a peer’s smile is since she’s masked all day. 2 years is 33% of my first grader’s life. Who luckily avoided any long term school closures, but goes crazy whenever there’s a two week “virtual learning” session. What happened is, therefore, that peoples lives cannot be put on hold indefinitely. There are worse fates than death [2]. We have the tools and knowledge to deal with COVID and we want to return to normal. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm [2] ironically, a person who doesn't understand that doesn't have much to live for.
  • chrononaut 5y ago
    > According to the CDC (why do I trust them?) How would you (or really anyone I suppose) evaluate whether to trust the CDC or some other equivalent? Also, thanks for those numbers. I don't know why that breakdown isn't more widely pushed.
    • tagoregrtst 5y ago
• ricardobayes 5y ago
  I think the key might be prevalence of obesity sadly as that's a common co-morbidity in the US, more so than anywhere else.
• sokoloff 5y ago
  > I get that everybody is tired of it, I am too, but it feels like we wasted two years of everybody's life just the take the bullet anyway. Clearly at some point, we’re going to end the pandemic-related restrictions, right? It seems a valid question to ask periodically “is now the right time to stop doing X?” Whatever X is and whether or not you think X is effective vs X’s downsides are all factors into your answer, but factors that shouldn’t preclude asking the question. There are going to be a range of people’s answers from “YOLO!” to “but think of the children/grandma!” Society (with government as the instrument) would do well to decide based on the science and stats, not on what the extremists on either end would prefer. At some point, we’re going to stop wasting everyone’s years all together, but that’s inevitably going to take all the years away from (kill) at least one person who would have survived if we’d stayed locked down. It’s a living Trolley Problem.
• hwers 5y ago
  Sunk cost fallacy. Yeah we sunk two years into it but wasting another two doesn't seem worth it just to make the previous two not be a wasted investment.
• outside1234 5y ago
  We didn’t waste two years - we developed a vaccine which the intelligent in the population have taken. Some haven’t and are paying the consequences.