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South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

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Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#441

Post by eznzt »

enumjorge wrote: post #78
jimkleiber wrote: post #11

My friend works in the covid ICU here in Michigan and told me yesterday that she's seeing a dramatic increase in patients who are getting angry at her and still believing that covid is not real. When she asks where they may have caught it, they sometimes say at a wedding with 100 people where no one was wearing masks. I can't imagine how emotionally taxing it was to be a healthcare worker attending to people with cov…

I don’t know how these healthcare workers do it. Why would I put my physical and mental health in danger to save people who are that selfish? I suspect many of them need the job. But those who do it out of a sense of duty are better people than I am I guess.

Healthcare pays very, very well.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#442

Post by rhino369 »

kn0where wrote: post #379
clairity wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's rationalization, not science. feel free to wear a mask everywhere if it makes you feel better and aligns with your mediosocial affiliations, but the breadth of science show that masks are effective in specific, marginal situations, not everywhere, and that its population-level effects are drowned out by other, better mitigations.

Maybe we’ve been reading very different breadths of science. Saying masks only work in a small number of situations sounds more like rationalization for not wearing one when we know aerosols are a major source of spread, and that masks significantly reduce aerosol transmission.

1) I don't think its consensus that aerosols are a MAJOR source of spread.

2) Masks are much less effective for aerosols than for droplet transmission. I think the consensus is they at least somewhat reduce aerosol transmission. Only n95 w/o exhale vents that are properly worn are believed to be good at reducing aerosol transmission.

The fact that your glasses fog up shows that surgical masks certainly are very leaky.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#443

Post by zests »

ryandrake wrote: post #363
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The states aren't run by stupid people. They're not gonna send in some state cops start shooting people over masks or to escalate in that direction. They don't have the manpower to enforce mask mandates without the consent of the governed. Their options for projecting power into areas where people have relatively homogeneously chosen to not comply are limited.

There are plenty of examples of unpopular rules successfully enforced, from school integration to the War On Drugs. The lack of mask/distancing enforcement is purely government cowardice and indifference. They could do it if they wanted to. Publicly fire a few county bumpkin Sheriffs who refuse to enforce the mandates and you'd see an attitude change.

So when people protest, are you going to break up the protests?

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#444

Post by ryandrake »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #335
BrianOnHN wrote: post #220

Tangent, but, since ~2010, I believed HN was the smartest publicly available forum. It made sense that the users here would go on to be leaders at innovative companies. Something changed around 2016 and has accelerated since 2018. Seeing the "COVID denial" comments in this thread is exactly what I'm talking about. It's just too bad.

Worse, this entire thread has already been flagged into oblivion, like any other thread that HN apparently "can't handle" anymore, Sadly, that will ultimately decrease the amount of smarts working on this critical problem.

I'm also shocked at the amount of COVID downplaying, but I guess it's better than the usual "only one right opinion" you see on other controversial topics where the echo chamber is stronger. I guess I'd rather engage and debate a COVID denier than have their posts simply downvoted to -4 and flag-killed.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#445

Post by rhino369 »

subsubzero wrote: post #215
aazaa wrote: post #77

Politics seems to be a factor here, but I wonder how much of this has to do with popular culture. Over the last 20 years we've been bombarded with metric tons of Apocalypse porn, a lot of it focused on killer viruses. Most of those movies are unrealistic to put it mildly. Zombies. Deserted cities. Rotting corpses on sidewalks. Visible, palpable nauseating death. This pandemic is nothing like those movies. I know of n…

I don't know stuff has been pretty apocalyptic the past 9 months. In San Jose a normally busy clean commercial street was boarded up on every store front with graffiti on most boards(BLM riots/protests). Trash was everywhere. Everyone was wearing masks. In NYC in April mobile morgue trucks flooded the city as the dead exceeded the capacity of the city's morgues. Drive by some parking lots and see hundreds of cars wai…

This probably somewhat explains why people in rural and suburban areas are quick to dismiss it as a hoax. None of what you seen is present outside of coastal American cities.

I vacationed in rural Wisconsin this summer. Felt like every other summer I spent there.

I think it was a mistake to lockdown many states in March that didn't really have a large number of infections. They spent 2-3 months lockdown for a virus that didn't really exist in their world yet. They formed their opinion that it was FRAUDVIRUS at that time. And aren't reevaluating now that they are finally getting their huge wave.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#446

Post by rhino369 »

_-david-_ wrote: post #384
munificent wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the South Dakota Department of Health site, they 36.2% of the ICU beds are currently available [1]. According to this article [2], that count includes NICU (infant) beds, which will not be very helpful for COVID-19, which mostly seriously infects adults. [1]: https://doh.sd.gov/news/Coronavirus.aspx [2]: https://apnews.com/article/virus-outbreak-sioux-falls-voting...

How many beds are usually available? If there is, for example, only typically 40% of ICU beds available then being at 36% isn't that bad.

I've looked into these states and its really hard to get a good idea how close we are. There are easy solutions to quickly expanding ICU beds:

1) moving patients who don't need to be in ICU back to the regular wards. Hospitals tend to have a "use it or lose it" view of ICU beds.

2) you can turn regulars ward beds into ICU beds fairly quickly.

The limiting factor is essentially the doctors/nurses/staff. They are able to squeeze more space by forcing doctors/nurses/staff to work longer hours. But you can't shift radiology doctors/nurses to ICU since they aren't qualified.

We'll know things are bad when there is a call for doctors from less hard areas to fly to the infected areas.

Long story short, its hard to know as layperson what % is bad, so we should just listen to the experts.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#447

Post by vkou »

salmon30salmon wrote: post #287
NathanKP wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the unintended consequences of drastic policies are economic hardship, creating a new generation of homelessness, drug and alcohol addiction, and deaths of despair. None of these things are inevitable. For example China arguably implemented some extremely drastic policies and they are doing just fine now. New Zealand did the same. In the United States we are just doing an incredibly bad job at this. Too many people…

The way China controlled the virus is legally impossible in the United States. You simply can't confine someone to their home without due process. New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel. Early in COVID, everyone suddenly became statisticians and had opinions on exponential growth, and while most of their proclamations were ill-informed, the truth remains that o…

> New Zealand is an island that, for all intents and purposes, closed their ports to human travel.

Firstly, New Zealand is not closed to human travel. It has mandatory quarantine for inbound travelers.

The US can do the same. It is in an even better situation to do so than New Zealand, because its economy is less dependant on tourism and imports.

It would be utterly pointless, of course, because nearly anywhere in the world has less COVID-per-capita than the US. A random traveler from Kentucky, or New Jersey is just as likely to be a COVID carrier as someone flying in from Paris. Keeping Parisians out isn't doing anything to stop spread, at this point. [1]

As for the legality of locking people in their own homes, the US is no stranger to blanket curfews during a state of emergency... Or for imprisoning symptomatic, or asymptomatic carriers of a disease.

[1] In a stroke of brilliance, travel from China to the US is still banned. Can anyone puzzle out how this policy is currently helping improve American health outcomes?

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#448

Post by VintageVibes »

dmode wrote: post #345
svrb wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can pretty safely conclude that any data saying blue cities have it worse than bumfuck nowhere towns must be misleading or manipulated. It just doesn't line up with what we know about education levels and compliance levels.

San Francisco is the second densest city in America. San Francisco has the lowest COVID transmission rates of any city, with recently a positive test rate under 1%. Masks matter.

I wonder if cities having a high proportion of knowledge workers that are all able to work from home has a big impact too. The less people gather in groups, the better.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#449

Post by pmiller2 »

whalesalad wrote: post #12

My wife and I just moved from Orange County, CA to Detroit, MI this last August. We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit. In Vegas the concern for masks started to w…

I had the exact same experience on a trip to Tahoe a few months ago. My girlfriend and I needed to get away, so, we booked a hotel and just stayed in for the weekend. We didn't see one single other person wearing a mask who wasn't some sort of restaurant server. We got our food to go.

Re: South Dakota nurse says many dying patients still insist Covid-19 'not real'

#450

Post by pmiller2 »

coding123 wrote: post #107
whalesalad wrote: post #12

My wife and I just moved from Orange County, CA to Detroit, MI this last August. We decided to drive the northern route. Heading through Vegas, Utah, Yellowstone and Montana. Then onward through the plains of North Dakota and Minnesota. Turning north we entered Wisconsin and finally the UP (Upper Peninsula) of Michigan. After a few days exploring we turned south to Detroit. In Vegas the concern for masks started to w…

It's actually the state governments that's at fault here. Not the specifically the people. Let me tell you I was in back-country Oregon recently, some of the MOST republican places within Oregon, not going to name drop the county. Anyway, the Oregon state government is very much democratic (cause you know Portland). But because of that, even the republican counties are under a mask order. And the extremely red counti…

With mask noncompliance so widespread, what exactly is Biden going to do? Throw all the anti-maskers in jail? Post law enforcement outside their houses to force them to quarantine? In fact, while the state technically has legal authority to get people to comply with mask mandates, they don't literally have the ability to do so. So, I would argue that the state doesn't have the "power" to do anything here at all, or, at least that it hasn't been demonstrated to date.
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