El Jefe wrote: ↑Sun Jan 09, 2022 9:57 amBINGO!! Poor planning. Recall the phrase:Resmo112 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 09, 2022 9:20 amdoesn't change the fact that it's stressing an already overly stressed, underprepared health care system.El Jefe wrote: ↑Sat Jan 08, 2022 11:11 am
That is, on average, 20 kids per state, per day. That is not a lot.
And then there is the issue Pop brought up in the post just above this one. Every kid--and virtually everyone of every age--admitted to a hospital right now has a Covid test. That's just SOP. A positive test results in a reporting of a number of Covid cases of children in the hospital. That is a misleading statistic. Most of those kids did not get admitted for Covid, but for other reasons. And as transmissable as the new variant is, a lot of kids are going to have it, and many will contract while hospitalized. It is akin to the common cold, and indeed a coronavirus is the cause of the common cold in a large percentage of cases.
So the reporting of 1,000 kids per day getting admitted to the hospital is an attempt to conflate the presence of Covid with Covid being the reason admission. The Covid statistics are reported without any context or perspective, which is flat wrong, and leads people to incorrect conclusions. What we really need to know is how many kids were admitted to the hospital BECAUSE of Covid. That is a useful and informative statistic, and one that those who "follow the science" SHOULD be tracking. But we don't get that information. I wonder why?
And then I question the statistics. If you heard what Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said yesterday, you'd cringe. A supposedly wise and highly educated person stated that there were 100,000 kids (that's 2,000 per state, on average) in the hospital with Covid right now, most of them serious, many on ventilators. That's just utter hogwash, but people hear this and buy it. It's hard to do anything right when the statistics have no context, are trumped up, or just flat out made up to advance some argument. There's no science or analysis in any of this bullshit. But the person who uttered that statistic is going to render a decision on the Federal government's OSHA vaccine mandate for employers with more than 100 employees. And that person doesn't have a clue. Actually worse, that person is either pimping an agenda, or is so blatantly devoid of common sense, analytical ability, and judgment that she is unqualified to hold any influential position in society.
"Poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part."
This is what you get when Federal and state governments, via certificate of need laws, and reimbursement mechanisms that become ever more important as more people are transitioned to a government run payor who dictate the economics of health care as a central planning agency. You want more of the same? So let's go screw up the economy and everyone's lives because our health care system is tethered to a bunch of people who cannot manage their way out of a paper bag. There may--or may not--be inadequate capacity or flexibility to deal with an increase in demand. But when you artificially limit supply, you get artificial "crises".
Here's more, from Anthony Furey of The Toronto Sun, who articulates the issue pretty well:
Well, here’s the answer: Public health officials are not particularly bothered by the prospects of thousands of people getting mild Omicron. But the Ontario government estimates that Omicron currently has a 0.3% hospitalization rate. This means that when 20,000 people come down with the virus, 60 of them will need a hospital bed.
This, we’re told, presents a risk to the stability of the hospital system — the biggest concern being the number of patients in ICU for COVID-19, which currently sits at around 350 in Ontario.
But do these numbers justify the forced shutdown of society, the closing of our children’s schools, and all of the now documented harms that come with these measures? The percentage of people who are answering yes to that question gets smaller by the day.I know this is in Canada, but the health care system in the US is becoming more like Canada's every day, and the challenges with Covid are virtually the same.It’s become something of a farce to see senior health bureaucrats and executives stand in front of the cameras and brag to us about how after almost two years of this they’re still caught off guard when a few hundred people are admitted to ICU.
If the healthcare system is at risk of collapse based on such numbers, maybe the people running the system have some explaining to do. Talk about a group of people clearly in over their heads.
How is the US's healthcare system changing at all? apart from becoming more and more privitized and in no way like a decent affordable healthcare system?
"poor planning on your part doesn't constitute an emergency on mine"
It's public health dude. It's not perfect, there was good planning the republicans shut it down in 2018 when they shut down the CDCs pandemic task force. My point is, doing your part for the betterment of the society we live in includes public health.