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Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

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Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#41

That is what people voted for...

I don’t buy that explanation. Democracy turned out to be easily manipulatable with large sums of money and media control. At this point, an average person can’t have much of an affect on how government is acting. Very few people can take a day off to protest, and even if they do, protests tend to be meaningless too. I’m not saying that average person is blameless but most of the fault lies with the ruling classes.

The founding fathers were heavily against democracy and did everything they could to limit the power of the government without being completely ineffective. Idea being that individuals create wealth. Government will always become tyrannical.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#42
post #13

Canada is having the same issue with 20hr waits in the emergency room and others being rejected outright https://globalnews.ca/news/9066662/emergency-rooms-canada-bi... I’ve heard a big part is all the doctors have been going on vacation all at once now that COVID is largely over, after not taking them for two years. They don’t have enough staff to cover even partial shortages. That plus the elephant in the room of p…

Family member recently received emergency care in northern NY. Several of the nurses were Canadian coming over the bridge for better pay.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#43
I don't have time to go in depth on this but I'm a bit skeptical of the claims here

After adjusting for age, the english excess death rate is 5% above. It is the highest. But it also just came from being the lowest several months ago. How much natural variance is in this data. Is this moment noteworthy? Is it possible we're not seeing more people die sooner but rather a large chunk of people putting off death a few months all kicking the bucket now for some reason?

Twitter confuses me a bit but reading all the thread here seemed to hide some additional posts which were important. The rate of people going into the emergency room is normalish. The rate of people leaving it is slow but not clearly slower than normal. This does suggest the general problem is really that we don't know where to put all these incapable poor health old people.

But... If we assume that people are leaving the system at the same rate as before (afaict no data here), and that the health system had large inflows of patients from covid earlier, it seems likely that this is just the system slowly returning to equilibrium and dealing with that excess bulge of patients who entered and are hard to get rid of. The problem is probably not that patient outflows have gotten worse. It's just that there are more patients in there now because there were a lot more new patients shortly before now.

He's got one critical chart which shows that hospital occupancy % has been growing from 6% to 8% 2010-2020. It is now at 12%. But the data is missing for the pandemic period for some reason. So... that seems like an important bit. Is this problem correcting itself? Kind of depends on the rate of change we're seeing in this figure if the rest of the analysis is to be believed. But it's hidden and too short term to make a good forecast on just the recent months.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#44
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t buy that explanation. Democracy turned out to be easily manipulatable with large sums of money and media control. At this point, an average person can’t have much of an affect on how government is acting. Very few people can take a day off to protest, and even if they do, protests tend to be meaningless too. I’m not saying that average person is blameless but most of the fault lies with the ruling classes.

Nahh... when people say "the vote was manipulated" what they mean is "the vote made no sense to me personally, and clearly the voters can't be blamed, so it must have been manipulated". There are plenty of examples of billions being thrown at campaigns and barely even moving the needle (e.g. Bloomberg's $1B fight for the Presidential race where he didn't even get 1% of the vote).

Or maybe a water main breaks during vote counting and everyone is sent home. Except one party that keeps working. But of course nothing suspicious about that.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#46
post #42
post #13

Canada is having the same issue with 20hr waits in the emergency room and others being rejected outright https://globalnews.ca/news/9066662/emergency-rooms-canada-bi... I’ve heard a big part is all the doctors have been going on vacation all at once now that COVID is largely over, after not taking them for two years. They don’t have enough staff to cover even partial shortages. That plus the elephant in the room of p…

Family member recently received emergency care in northern NY. Several of the nurses were Canadian coming over the bridge for better pay.

Nurses are leaving a ton of places in the US for better pay elsewhere, too.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#47

For those not from the UK there’s a wider narrative at play here. Any and all government bashing is almost a national sport and pastime at this stage. Throw in some numbers to try to prove your point and you’re going to be well received. So there’s a lot of misinformation out there. Perhaps this Twitter chap is talking rubbish too. For the record not saying our government is perfect but holy heck it’s hard to keep up…

"This Twitter chap" is a journalist at the Financial Times and is a senior fellow at the London School of Economics. He's not just some rando bashing government...

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No they didn’t. More people voted against the conservatives than voted for them, but due to the first past the post system they got a massive majority in Parliament and can do whatever they want.

But they voted for first past the post!! In my opinion that was the defining moment that cemented the UK's decline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternativ...

I voted against an Alternative Vote, I do support Proportional Representation.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#49

They subtract COVID deaths from excess deaths to get the baseline, forgetting that COVID deaths were counted somewhat liberally, and some percentage of non-COVID deaths were counted as COVID deaths if someone was infected close to their time of death. This can be seen in the following chart: https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor... (You need to change the "Metric" dropdown) If you compare exces…

> They subtract COVID deaths from excess deaths to get the baseline, forgetting that COVID deaths were counted somewhat liberally, and some percentage of non-COVID deaths were counted as COVID deaths if someone was infected close to their time of death. If COVID deaths were counted liberaly and even after subtracting those inflated numbers you still have excess deaths, then that only further underlines their point th…

No, they say that current non-COVID excess deaths are higher than non-COVID excess deaths were during COVID. They underestimate non-COVID excess deaths during COVID because of the subtraction, which makes current excess deaths higher than average. In reality, they underestimated the average that they compare to. Hope it's clear now.

Re: Collapse of emergency healthcare in England may be costing 500 lives every week

#50
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t buy that explanation. Democracy turned out to be easily manipulatable with large sums of money and media control. At this point, an average person can’t have much of an affect on how government is acting. Very few people can take a day off to protest, and even if they do, protests tend to be meaningless too. I’m not saying that average person is blameless but most of the fault lies with the ruling classes.

Nahh... when people say "the vote was manipulated" what they mean is "the vote made no sense to me personally, and clearly the voters can't be blamed, so it must have been manipulated". There are plenty of examples of billions being thrown at campaigns and barely even moving the needle (e.g. Bloomberg's $1B fight for the Presidential race where he didn't even get 1% of the vote).

People aren't arguing that the vote was manipulated in the UK, rather that the voters were misled, especially by the partisan media.
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