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From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity. While this might disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a se

From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity. While this might disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a service anyone could need at any time for a wide range of reasons.

spookthesunset 5y ago
> From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. We should have relaxed our approach to all this when cities across the country were closing their unused field hospitals. Instead of celebrating the fact that covid wasn't nearly as lethal as the earliest models predicted, governors across the country doubled down on their covid restrictions. Two years later, they are finally almost gone. Did any of these restrictions provide enough benefit to justify their immense social cost? It will probably take much cooler heads to find out. It troubles me that we went into this mess with little understanding if the measures even worked. In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent.
- kevinventullo 5y ago
  there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk I know several people who had to delay surgeries and other medical procedures because of hospital capacity due to COVID.
  - Lammy 5y ago
    A person in my family had to delay a major procedure too, but the excuse was that it "wasn't safe" like they were being done a favor :/
  - treeman79 5y ago
    I had to delay and miss many appointments because everything was shutdown due to pandemic. Nearly died from it. Many others did die because they stopped getting routine care.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      Covid didn’t shut down that stuff. The government did. And it was a bad call…
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Nope. It was due to hospitals being on edge and delaying elective surgery "just in case". COVID didn't cause capacity issues at hospitals, humans reaction to covid did.
    - clysm 5y ago
      Do you have a source on that? I know multiple nurses and doctors who were re-assigned to help with COVID patients, or came out of retirement to help with staffing shortages.
      - spookthesunset 5y ago
        There won’t be a source. It will take a decade of research to show my hypotheses as valid or invalid. No way can it be measured now… too many hot heads. But I’d wager a lot of money that I’m right and most of the hospital issues were self-created problems caused by testing everything with a pulse. That’s my hypothesis and I’m sticking to it!
      - nradov 5y ago
        I know multiple nurses and doctors who had their hours drastically cut for months. They weren't re-assigned to help with COVID patients.
  - CWuestefeld 5y ago
    AFAIK, this happened, but was consistently due to proactive closures in expectation of overcrowding that nearly never came to pass. Although a lot of ink was spilled on the potential for hospitals being overrun, there were vanishingly few cases in which it actually happened.
- hh3k0 5y ago
  > And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. What? Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave.
  - theli0nheart 5y ago
    > Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave. I don't recall this happening. Can you provide a source for this?
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      They can't. You'll just get links to some NYT article whose main content suggests "we are preparing for a surge" or something of that nature. I've yet to see any kind of actual study that compares hospital capacity during these "surges" vs hospital capacity in the "before times". Also I strongly suspect future research will show that most of the hospital issues were self-inflicted wounds. We tested everybody who came into the hospital and invoked crazy high-overhead processes for positive results irregardless of symptoms. The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. There has never been a real issue of hospital capacity--at least in the US anyway.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - hh3k0 5y ago
        > The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. I mean, I don't know about you but I certainly do not consider this normal: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/13/er_slammed-getty-1230421258-f325effe0d425387e43b8b0ff339f5f72bd30dad-s1200-c85.webp https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/13/er_slammed-getty... Image caption is: "A nurse walks inside a temporary emergency room, built into a parking garage at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, Calif., on Jan. 3, 2021. Since Thanksgiving, cases have risen to the point where 80% of the hospital is filled with patients with COVID-19 and 90% of the ICU is filled with COVID-19." Taken from: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902744/ers-are-overwhelmed-as-omicron-continues-to-flood-them-with-patients https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902...
- tallytarik 5y ago
  > In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent. But then… doesn’t this cover all government decisions and legislation? If presented with this hypothetical situation in advance, perhaps we’d have preferred our governments did X, Y and Z differently. But the ‘consent’ was given when our generation, or our parents’ or grandparents’, voted in the governments which passed the laws to allow for this. With hindsight, I suspect many will not vote for the same governments again. But some will. Perhaps even the majority will. In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who enacted what you call ‘experiments’ were re-elected in landslides. In that case, I’d say that many people have given consent. That said, I agree with your suggestion that we should try to figure out the cost/benefit of these measures. I think that’s a critical step over the next few years.
  - ekianjo 5y ago
    > In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who enacted what you call ‘experiments’ were re-elected in landslides. the governments had the media in their pockets from day 1 so of course the prevailing opinion would be they did well and would be reelected. just like Putin having great ratings in Russia.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    The problem is that democracy is the tyranny of the majority on the minority. I think we need to move to a more decentralised society where power is spread across the population and it sits as close as possible to the individual affected by the rules, the ultimate form being personal responsibility.
- 30367286 5y ago
  > And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk Are you suggesting that this story is inaccurate? Your claim is baffling in the face of… well, all the stories I’ve been reading the past two years. https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-coronavirus-surge-emergency-rooms-swamped-20200718-k62hnhxosbhchcznxks4me74zu-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-coronavirus...
- ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
  Korea is currently rationing hospital care in the middle of an Omicron wave. Covid-related patient care (previously unlimited, with a small fraction of patients hospitalized for four to six weeks) is now provided on NHS for only seven days, after which point the patient must pay out-of-pocket and/or find their own hospital bed. When this policy was introduced (the limit used to be two weeks), there was a minor uproar, with doctors accusing the government of killing patients.
- orblivion 5y ago
  > And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. My parents' friend had to delay a surgery after a heart attack in Minneapolis this winter because so many places were booked. I heard similar issues in New Hampshire. Nobody seemed to talk about it at that point, maybe because it's hard to quantify "strain" or exactly how many people died or otherwise suffered as a result.
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  I’m guessing you don’t know a lot of ICU nurses?
- phil21 5y ago
  > And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. Interesting take. My healthcare friends (doctors and nurses) literally 100% of them have either already bounced from the field, or have plans to immediately once they pay off medical debt. Fully and entirely due to the way they were treated during covid by hospital administration and the collapse-like conditions they were forced to work through. The bill coming due for our healthcare system hasn't even started installment payments yet.

spookthesunset 5y ago

> From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. We should have relaxed our approach to all this when cities across the country were closing their unused field hospitals. Instead of celebrating the fact that covid wasn't nearly as lethal as the earliest models predicted, governors across the country doubled down on their covid restrictions. Two years later, they are finally almost gone. Did any of these restrictions provide enough benefit to justify their immense social cost? It will probably take much cooler heads to find out. It troubles me that we went into this mess with little understanding if the measures even worked. In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent.

kevinventullo 5y ago
there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk I know several people who had to delay surgeries and other medical procedures because of hospital capacity due to COVID.
- Lammy 5y ago
  A person in my family had to delay a major procedure too, but the excuse was that it "wasn't safe" like they were being done a favor :/
- treeman79 5y ago
  I had to delay and miss many appointments because everything was shutdown due to pandemic. Nearly died from it. Many others did die because they stopped getting routine care.
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    Covid didn’t shut down that stuff. The government did. And it was a bad call…
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  Nope. It was due to hospitals being on edge and delaying elective surgery "just in case". COVID didn't cause capacity issues at hospitals, humans reaction to covid did.
  - clysm 5y ago
    Do you have a source on that? I know multiple nurses and doctors who were re-assigned to help with COVID patients, or came out of retirement to help with staffing shortages.
    - spookthesunset 5y ago
      There won’t be a source. It will take a decade of research to show my hypotheses as valid or invalid. No way can it be measured now… too many hot heads. But I’d wager a lot of money that I’m right and most of the hospital issues were self-created problems caused by testing everything with a pulse. That’s my hypothesis and I’m sticking to it!
    - nradov 5y ago
      I know multiple nurses and doctors who had their hours drastically cut for months. They weren't re-assigned to help with COVID patients.
- CWuestefeld 5y ago
  AFAIK, this happened, but was consistently due to proactive closures in expectation of overcrowding that nearly never came to pass. Although a lot of ink was spilled on the potential for hospitals being overrun, there were vanishingly few cases in which it actually happened.
hh3k0 5y ago
> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. What? Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave.
- theli0nheart 5y ago
  > Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave. I don't recall this happening. Can you provide a source for this?
  - spookthesunset 5y ago
    They can't. You'll just get links to some NYT article whose main content suggests "we are preparing for a surge" or something of that nature. I've yet to see any kind of actual study that compares hospital capacity during these "surges" vs hospital capacity in the "before times". Also I strongly suspect future research will show that most of the hospital issues were self-inflicted wounds. We tested everybody who came into the hospital and invoked crazy high-overhead processes for positive results irregardless of symptoms. The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. There has never been a real issue of hospital capacity--at least in the US anyway.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - hh3k0 5y ago
      > The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. I mean, I don't know about you but I certainly do not consider this normal: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/13/er_slammed-getty-1230421258-f325effe0d425387e43b8b0ff339f5f72bd30dad-s1200-c85.webp https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/13/er_slammed-getty... Image caption is: "A nurse walks inside a temporary emergency room, built into a parking garage at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, Calif., on Jan. 3, 2021. Since Thanksgiving, cases have risen to the point where 80% of the hospital is filled with patients with COVID-19 and 90% of the ICU is filled with COVID-19." Taken from: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902744/ers-are-overwhelmed-as-omicron-continues-to-flood-them-with-patients https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902...
tallytarik 5y ago
> In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent. But then… doesn’t this cover all government decisions and legislation? If presented with this hypothetical situation in advance, perhaps we’d have preferred our governments did X, Y and Z differently. But the ‘consent’ was given when our generation, or our parents’ or grandparents’, voted in the governments which passed the laws to allow for this. With hindsight, I suspect many will not vote for the same governments again. But some will. Perhaps even the majority will. In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who enacted what you call ‘experiments’ were re-elected in landslides. In that case, I’d say that many people have given consent. That said, I agree with your suggestion that we should try to figure out the cost/benefit of these measures. I think that’s a critical step over the next few years.
- ekianjo 5y ago
  > In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who enacted what you call ‘experiments’ were re-elected in landslides. the governments had the media in their pockets from day 1 so of course the prevailing opinion would be they did well and would be reelected. just like Putin having great ratings in Russia.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  The problem is that democracy is the tyranny of the majority on the minority. I think we need to move to a more decentralised society where power is spread across the population and it sits as close as possible to the individual affected by the rules, the ultimate form being personal responsibility.
30367286 5y ago
> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk Are you suggesting that this story is inaccurate? Your claim is baffling in the face of… well, all the stories I’ve been reading the past two years. https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-coronavirus-surge-emergency-rooms-swamped-20200718-k62hnhxosbhchcznxks4me74zu-story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-coronavirus...
ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
Korea is currently rationing hospital care in the middle of an Omicron wave. Covid-related patient care (previously unlimited, with a small fraction of patients hospitalized for four to six weeks) is now provided on NHS for only seven days, after which point the patient must pay out-of-pocket and/or find their own hospital bed. When this policy was introduced (the limit used to be two weeks), there was a minor uproar, with doctors accusing the government of killing patients.
orblivion 5y ago
> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. My parents' friend had to delay a surgery after a heart attack in Minneapolis this winter because so many places were booked. I heard similar issues in New Hampshire. Nobody seemed to talk about it at that point, maybe because it's hard to quantify "strain" or exactly how many people died or otherwise suffered as a result.
coffeefirst 5y ago
I’m guessing you don’t know a lot of ICU nurses?
phil21 5y ago
> And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. Interesting take. My healthcare friends (doctors and nurses) literally 100% of them have either already bounced from the field, or have plans to immediately once they pay off medical debt. Fully and entirely due to the way they were treated during covid by hospital administration and the collapse-like conditions they were forced to work through. The bill coming due for our healthcare system hasn't even started installment payments yet.