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Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

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Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#231

Post by dec0dedab0de »

Zelphyr wrote: post #33
js2 wrote: post #16

The 2017-2018 flu season also overwhelmed US hospitals: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie... https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.ht... My point isn't that we should take Coronavirus any less seriously this year. Healthcare workers have no vaccine for it. It's on top of the flu. Etc. My point is that we should take the flu more seriously every year. Everyone gets their…

Yes, I do. Helps that I live with a Nurse Practitioner. However, the number of people I know who are convinced that getting the flu shot makes them sick or gives them the flu and thus refuse to get the shot is shocking. Some things I've actually heard: "I get sick every time!" No, you don't. "It's a LIVE VIRUS! Everybody knows this!" No, it's not. You're just an idiot hanging around with idiots.

I used to skip the flu shot because getting a week home from work every 3-6 years was nice. This year I got

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#232

Post by gruez »

luch wrote: post #214
bistro wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because everyone gets the flu shot in EU, or because nobody cares?

No unless you're at risk (old person or with medical issues) you usually don't get the flu shot. The reason is to actually to build the so-called "herd immunity" I think. Same thing with antibiotics (no need to give evolutionary "ammunition" to virus and bacteria if we don't need to).

>The reason is to actually to build the so-called "herd immunity" I think. Same thing with antibiotics (no need to give evolutionary "ammunition" to virus and bacteria if we don't need to).

I don't think that's the right comparison. Herd immunity refers to stopping a disease by spreading by making enough of the population immune so it can't spread. It doesn't have anything to do with evolutionary pressures or superbugs, like what you're alluding to with your second sentence.

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#233

Post by MereInterest »

makomk wrote: post #162
falcolas wrote: post #67

Like most other for-profit enterprises, there is little incentive to maintain capacity greater than what is needed needed to handle the "average" demand. So when something exceptional happens, of course the capacity is inadequate. You can also (likely successfully) argue that this will also happen in a government run healthcare system, but the situation has certainly not been improved by capitalism as implemented in…

Oh, it definitely happens in government-run healthcare systems. Remember how proponents of single-payer government healthcare in the US used to point to the amount of money that the UK spends on the NHS and argue that the US would save money by switching? One of the ways the NHS keeps costs down is by not maintaining excess capacity, meaning that even a moderately bad flu season is a major struggle.

Doesn't that apply to for-profit hospitals as well? In both cases, there is an incentive to avoid paying for excess capacity.

The cost advantage of a single-payer system is in larger negotiation. A single person has no leverage at all in negotiating with a hospital. An insurance network has some leverage when negotiating with hospitals, but results in user-complexity trying to navigate the in-network and out-of-network agreements. A single-payer has a large amount of leverage when negotiating with hospitals, and can avoid price gouging from manufacturers.

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#234

Post by ceejayoz »

yters wrote: post #212

another question i have is are positive tests being sent to icu even if the symptoms are not bad?

Not here in Rochester, NY. Our ICUs aren't full yet, and the county is giving "number hospitalized" and "number in ICU" distinct numbers. Ours are about 50% ICU right now.

https://twitter.com/CountyExecBello/status/12431834845097861...

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#235

Post by slazaro »

legulere wrote: post #151
js2 wrote: post #16

The 2017-2018 flu season also overwhelmed US hospitals: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie... https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.ht... My point isn't that we should take Coronavirus any less seriously this year. Healthcare workers have no vaccine for it. It's on top of the flu. Etc. My point is that we should take the flu more seriously every year. Everyone gets their…

Stop comparing the Coronavirus to the flu. It’s the mistake that brought us to the current situation and which will bring us into much darker times than now if we don’t start to take things seriously.

But that's precisely the point. If the hospitals get overwhelmed with the flu regularly, how can we expect to cope with the current virus which is way worse?

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#236

Post by AzzieElbab »

js2 wrote: post #16

The 2017-2018 flu season also overwhelmed US hospitals: https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie... https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/season/flu-season-2017-2018.ht... My point isn't that we should take Coronavirus any less seriously this year. Healthcare workers have no vaccine for it. It's on top of the flu. Etc. My point is that we should take the flu more seriously every year. Everyone gets their…

This comparison is invalid and dangerous. You can't compare some absolute numbers against the unknown. Just look at fatalities rate in Italy. This virus can turn your lungs into dust within days under unknown conditions

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#237

Post by dominotw »

TomMckenny wrote: post #122

Judging from the comments, explaining the severity of the epidemic is now politically charged. Epidemiologists and the medical field have made it clear we are _under_ reacting. But apparently some politicians want to down play the problem and their obfuscation is echoed in every corner of the web with great zeal and again drowning out reality. It's like the climate change denial phenomenon but at high speed.

> But apparently some politicians want to down play the problem and their obfuscation is echoed in every corner of the web with great zeal and again drowning out reality.

Yes obviously they take the main blame.

but also others.

From Jan,

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/opinion/coronavirus-panic...

> China’s response appears to be driven by political considerations more than epidemiological ones. The government has imposed a travel lockdown on more than 35 million people, which experts say is a quarantine of unprecedented size and scale, yet it may not even turn out to be very effective.

what about the nameless experts media has been quoting to float their conspiracy theories. Will these ppl take some of the blame for eroding people's trust in experts?

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#238

Post by Someone »

”The state is home to more than 6% of the world's confirmed cases so far”

World population: 7½ billion. 6% of that: 450 million. Population of New York State: 20 million.

⇒ overrepresentation factor: 22½.

Open question: how much of that is due to more testing being done in New York State, compared to, say, India or Pakistan (large, less wealthy countries that may skew the statistics)

Re: Coronavirus patients start to overwhelm US hospitals

#240

Post by StrangeDoctor »

simonh wrote: post #136
karaterobot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a bit of an overreaction. The way I read that comment was very similar to your response to it: it's hard to get hard data in the middle of a crisis. The difference is that the commenter was also expressing the very natural, human response of frustration at this fact. A lot of people are feeling that way.

The serious problem with the comment is that it's saying these reports are annoying, however it is not the job of the providers of these reports to provide hard statistics, it's not as if any of them have the option to do that themselves instead. So it's basically just saying, shut up. I don't want to hear your annoying report of actual effects on human beings.

A more charitable reading of the comment would be an annoyance of anecdotes without underlying prevalence data to contextualize the info.

It would be all too easy for the media to pick a healthy senior with a mild case and tout “it sucks but it’s not so bad” or find cases of healthy 18yo dying in horrific conditions to fit their overall narrative.

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