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I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

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Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never admitted to a hospital in the US but have heard stories of other folks who have been. I just get a feeling that once you are admitted in a hospital nobody has any power including yourself. Everything is taken over by the "system". This is my biggest fear why I would never want to be hospitalized.

It actually benefits you to have a doctor in the family who is there navigating and talking to the doctors. The doctors are more receptive to each other and listen carefully. Otherwise you are just a number. And the doctors won't try so hard on patients who really don't have any understanding of medicine in the first place.

My wife went to the ER (in Manhattan) with septicemia a week after giving birth. She was left lying on a stretcher for 17 hours without as much as water to drink before they finally "found" a room for her. (Thankfully she recovered.)

A few months later, a friend who works at the hospital told me: I wish you had called me, I could have gotten you a room. And I thought: this is just like a third world country, where you need connections to get basic care.

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US cannot do testing and tracing because they waited too late. "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? I've been flabbergasted by the lack of wartime thinking this whole time in the US. We know how to mobilize things and build logistical supply chains, why can't we apply that to a in-country medical battle? Not only did the US governments (at all levels) demonstrate incompetence early, we'v…

> "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? Corona is basically endemic in the US. You can test nursing homes and airport arrivals, and do followup testing on a small population. You cannot test 320 million people, and do followup weekly testing on them. Perhaps you're inspired by the success in NZ or Taiwan. The US has a totally different situation. You seem to think that "doing something" is bett…

Did you just recently believe that herd immunity is the solution in the past month (or 2), or was it your ideal solution since January?

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#123
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything you wrote is weird and simply shows that you need a proper health care system over there.

America isn’t going to transform their healthcare market in the next several months. We can be ideological and let hospitals fail and doctors and nurses get laid off, or we can be pragmatic and focus on what creates the best outcome as we navigate the reality we are in.

The US cannot even prevent its own law enforcement from maiming innocent citizens, so I would not hold my breath for any healthcare reform.

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#124
post #59
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

88% is definitely not true. That paper retracted that claim.

Thanks a lot for correcting that. I was going off the stat NYC reported at the peak of the pandemic. Just checked and it is quite the stark difference. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/15/8567680... Quote from the article Old information: Early reports from China, the United Kingdom and Seattle found mortality rates as high as 90% among patients on ventilators. And more recently, a study of some New…

For others having a hard time reading those quotes on mobile:

Old information:

Early reports from China, the United Kingdom and Seattle found mortality rates as high as 90% among patients on ventilators.

And more recently, a study of some New York hospitals seemed to show a mortality rate of 88%.

New information:

The mortality rate among 165 COVID-19 patients placed on a ventilator at Emory was just under 30% .

And unlike the New York study, only a few patients were still on a ventilator when the data were collected.

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say the US gets to herd immunity and the rest of the world has done a really good job at containing the virus, e.g. New Zealand. What are they realistically going to do long term? Shut up their country until a vaccine arrives? Quarantine everyone coming in or going out for two weeks? Who is realistically going to want to travel into or out of there with those kind of restrictions. I seriously wonder if the short term…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-polio_syndrome Covid is a new disease. Will it have long term effects?

There are already articles of people who have recovered that will have to take anti-coagulants for the rest of their life.

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A substantial part of the US population will not cooperate.

Yes, but why? It may be a valid reason, but I don't know what it is.

In case you didn't see the riots last week, many US people don't trust the police. If somebody knocks on your door, how do you know what their real motive is?

Are they there for contact tracing, to serve a warrant, to tip off ICE, or to plant something?

After all, the CIA used vaccines as a ruse to hunt Bin Laden.

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Cannot"? Why wouldn't it just require a much bigger effort? Corona is basically endemic in the US. You can test nursing homes and airport arrivals, and do followup testing on a small population. You cannot test 320 million people, and do followup weekly testing on them. Perhaps you're inspired by the success in NZ or Taiwan. The US has a totally different situation. You seem to think that "doing something" is bett…

"You cannot test 320 million people, and do followup weekly testing on them." I mean, that is factually wrong. We could actually do that. It wouldn't even be that expensive. Of course, such a thing isn't really necessary. If everyone who wanted a test could get one without delay and get results back in hours, that would be sufficient to implement test and trace effectively.

I suggest you watch the videos from the Seattle hospital involved with the first corona patient.

They emphasize that each test is expensive, involving PPE for the collector, the lab assistants, reagents and machine time.

Then there's the question of accuracy and retesting to verify a positive result ...

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#129
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point. We are long past the point of containment. We will get to herd immunity no matter what. The question becomes, how to do it safely. The answer is to have in place sufficient capacity. One can have sufficient capacity easily if R is kept low. There are other ways of getting there (i.e., actually increasing capacity), or a combination thereof.

We will hopefully not get hers immunity. Spain, Italy and Sweden are not close yet and they were pretty close to capacity, same with NYC. There is no safe way to get to herd immunity, it’s vaccine or nothing.

I agree with you. I have yet to see evidence that once somebody is infected, they cannot get re-infected.

Not to mention, the vaccine needs to work on the correct strain AND be administered to what, 70% of the population?

Re: I'm Married to an ER Doc in NYC

#130
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Through US government incompetence we missed our chance to contain and suppress the virus back in February. Now the pandemic is so widespread that it's impractical to do enough contract tracing and isolation to eradicate the virus. In many areas the authorities aren't even bothering to try. So we're on a path to herd immunity whether we like it or not. Obviously this is a bad state of affairs. But it's important to u…

Say the US gets to herd immunity and the rest of the world has done a really good job at containing the virus, e.g. New Zealand. What are they realistically going to do long term? Shut up their country until a vaccine arrives? Quarantine everyone coming in or going out for two weeks? Who is realistically going to want to travel into or out of there with those kind of restrictions. I seriously wonder if the short term…

Please don't take this as being directed explicitly towards your comment. But why does anyone think there is such a thing as herd immunity for Covid-19?

I've been following the research since December/January on New England Journal of Medicine, Virological.org, Lancet etc. And I think there is not yet enough evidence to suggest that there is immunity conferred by contracting Covid-19.

Does anyone know of any studies claiming that "herd" immunity is even possible with Covid-19? The latest article I could find is: COVID-19 and Postinfection Immunity https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2766097

If there is no immunity or limited immunity conferred from infection then Covid-19 will be with the USA and other countries that have given up on control measures for a long time.

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