The thing that needs to not happen is filling up hospitals. People died where I live because they could not get access to 'elective' surgery due to the medical system being slammed during the most recent Delta wave.
Once that's not a factor, things will start getting more normal.
Like, it's been 2 years. We shouldn't be doing any of these restrictions at all. We should be angry at our governments wasting 2 years of our non-refundable time on this earth while they did nothing. Blaming the public for hospital capacity at this point is absurd.
The first wave of COVID killed a bunch of doctors and nurses, and burnt a lot more out.
Then Delta made a bunch more doctors and nurses quit, with wide reports right now that 20% of nurses are looking to up and leave their job. Talking to my friends who are nurses, they are short staffed, and have been for some time.
On top of that, the way the US does medical training for both nurses and doctors ensures we don't have enough medical professionals during normal times. Nursing schools can't find instructors (pay is too low) and hospitals are purposefully limiting the number of residency spots available to ensure prices for medical care stay high (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residency_(medicine)#Financing...)
So, you know, business as usual in the US.
The lack of healthcare capacity has been a conscious choice. There's been no serious effort to build it out. We've chosen to indulge this fantasy that humanity can get control of COVID and we'll just vaccinate it out of existence, despite decades of knowledge about how difficult that would be from our research into other coronaviruses. So when I hear that we need to give up another year of normal life to "keep the hospitals from being overwhelmed", it is frustrating to hear.
No, there wouldn't, because, among other things, comorbidities that must be managed, especially in the population most COVID hospitalizations come from.
> Combat soldiers learn basic emergency medical techniques, even to the point of running IVs
Which allows them to serve as, basically, better-than-nothing EMTs in the absence of anyone else, which is useful on the battlefield to keep people alive to get to proper medical care; they don't replace doctors and nurses, though.
IDK, I'm in a fairly 'cautious' state, and things are pretty normal. My kids are in school, stores are open. Restaurants are open. People wear masks. It's not really a big deal.
We managed to build giant ships in like 3 or 6 months in WWII. I'm pretty sure we could figure out how to staff 400 or so ICU's with people capable of managing sick covid patients. It might be all these people know how to do... but we could do it. We have almost unlimited resources to do so.
Personally, after 2 months of being angry with the ridiculous response of the government I just accepted that you can't fight with mass stupid and moved on to areas of my life that are not affected by covid.
But I still get surprised from time to time you know, you'd expect politicians to accept that everybody had the chance to get vaccinated and lift all the restrictions so that darwinism can do its work, but it seems they want to impose vaccine mandates instead... trying to protect people who don't want to be protected, what's the grand idea behind that?
There's no real end in sight to be honest, it's better to ignore it as much as possible and focus on areas you do control
If we are going to see constant new variants and new waves, then its the only choice we have.
Considering how relatively minor covid was, and how simple the situation is, that so many people continue to disagree on basics suggests to me that we have learned very little from this (indicating our capacity to learn certain things is not great), and that if we ever get a serious pandemic (or serious anything), we might be f*cked.
If we had a serious pandemic where dudes were dropping like flys on the street and they had horse drawn carrages stacked with bodies, I don't think many people would have an issue dealing with it. The problem with covid is our response to it was way out of line with the actual illness. People kinda have a problem being asked to make huge sacrifies for something they don't perceive to be a major problem.
Believe it or not, but 2020 hospital capacity was lower than projected using projections before anyone knew what covid even was.
[0]https://truthout.org/articles/20-rural-hospitals-closed-in-2...
Pretty good advice in my opinion.
Probably waiting on hospitals to be fully staffed and less busy.
My sibling moved from being a pedatric nurse to a non-patient care position (not at a hospital). She'd been nearly permanently removed from her pediatric role and moved to be on the front lines for COVID care for over a year with no relief in sight. She spent 2 years in Iraq and said that this is much more tiring and exasperating since she's treating people that largely could have avoided being in the hospital at all.
Her hospital has been cancelling elective procedures, so everyone is suffering from the COVID wave.
This is not what caution looks like.
I may not have all the details right on that, just seems the approach some are taking to covid is the "yes we won't eliminate it and yet we can try to minimize exposure during times of high infectiousness."
Public opinion.
0 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/356939/support-legal-marijuana-...
1 - https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/12/7/a-strong-majo...
Groupthink is so dangerous.
COVID was never going to be completely managed by states less than willing to take draconian measures, the purpose soft-lockdowns was instead to lighten the load on our healthcare system so that we didn't need to invest in field hospitals and a bunch of field-trained doctors and nurses. If we had done that instead not only would the optics be worse (not just many more people dying, think front page photos of them dying in muddy tents), it would also dilute the market capture of the existing entrenched healthcare system.
Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018? How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing? These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.
In the past two years we've printed 80% of all US Dollars that have been printed in the history of the USD. We are not short on funding. Further it's not death or illness that is largely to blame for healthcare worker shortage as the only large drop in HCWs was on march 2020. Since then it's been growing, just hasn't recovered yet.
Yes, the issue there is sociopathic political maneuvering rather than an actual lack of national resources which could have been used to help our society in its time of need.
> Can you show me an area where the covid+ college age population was a healthcare capacity burden?
In the early days of covid it was irresponsible spring breakers spreading covid at destinations like Florida and then back home a week later. These days, look for areas with small purple cities surrounded by large red counties. As far as personal experiences go a couple Eastern states and the Pacific Northwest have issues with hospitals being literally over capacity. Many healthcare workers have been pushed past their breaking points and the national guard has been (and still is) providing manpower at the hospital next to my state's capitol (which is located next to a handful of universities). As other surrounding state's healthcare systems were overwhelmed with delta waves those states denied noncritical care and eventually sent patients out to my state. The collapse of the healthcare system is an issue for old people on vents and also a huge issue for college kids when their parents and professors up and die (caused a huge issue at one of the colleges here when a particularly irreplaceable professor passed away) and/or there are no hospital beds for them and there's a year plus waitlist on the mental health services they need now more than ever. College kids are a covid sink since they generally suffer only mildly from covid yet spread it rapidly due to their social habits and environment. The college kids are not the demographic wrecking the healthcare system, but they still spread covid and are affected by covid in their communities. Asking them to stay home to prevent spreading infections isn't that big a deal.
> Further, if we're at such risk of overburdening our healthcare system, how come we have fewer heathcare workers today than we did back in 2018?
Because we've pushed them to the breaking point rather than supporting them. Some died, some retired, some straight up left the field. Back in June of 2020 the cops had no shortage of riot gear and were always able to dig up more crowd gas, meanwhile doctors and nurses had to reuse contaminated PPE for months while a bunch of supply chain fuckery played itself out. How do you think that feels as a doctor, watching a shipment of PPE your state paid for and imported for you get confiscated by the feds and put into a big pile to get sold back to the highest bidder? How do you think it feels to notice how the police can suppress riots for months on end with endless tear gas and yet you get one N95 mask every two weeks even though you spend your entire day around people dying of covid?
> How come our hospital bed capacity is shrinking instead of growing?
See the above, we chose to stress existing resources instead of training, building, and deploying new ones. We don't have new hospitals, we don't have nationwide boot camps to get young civically minded people the skills needed to help support society.
> These don't seem to be indicators that suggest we're lacking capacity in our healthcare systems.
The indicators that we're lacking capacity are the shortage of replacement workers, the shortage of hospital beds during covid waves, the insane wait times to see specialists, and finally the countless secondary deaths caused by covid patients taking up resources that could've been used by someone close to me with once-treatable cancer whose care was delayed until it metastasized and who will now die a slow, painful, and what should have been preventable death in the next couple of years.
