Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

I keep seeing these kinds of articles but I find many of them lacking in important details and context. While hospitals certainly have had plenty of instances of full ICUs and 100% occupancy I have not seen or heard of any instances of emergent surgeries being postponed or not done. At least in my hospital system which is the largest in Florida. Even when we had to basically double our ICU in number of beds and had 3 other floors full of Covid patients people were still having surgeries for things like gallbladder attacks and appendicitis. For the most part those surgeries require only an overnight stay and sometimes require no hospitalization at all. Of course if this kid's appendix ruptured he would require longer care.

 

..... and idiotically mandating that patients be sent back to nursing homes.

 

Florida may well end up catching NY too. Right now NY is averaging about 35 covid deaths per day and Florida is averaging more than 300.

 

Delta moving west. Idaho hospitals now rationing care

Idaho hospital forced to turn away hundreds of transfer patients amid Covid surge (msn.com)

Idaho hospitals are so overwhelmed with the surge in coronavirus cases that doctors and nurses have to contact dozens of regional hospitals across the West in hopes of finding places to transfer individual critical patients.

The situation has grown so bad that the Idaho Department of Health and Wellness announced Thursday that the entire state is in a hospital resource crisis, permitting medical facilities to ration health care and triage patients.

Kootenai Health, a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has already converted a conference room into an overflow Covid unit, started paying traveling nurses $250 an hour and brought in a military medical unit. The hospital received permission from the state to begin rationing care last week. That's all in response to the Covid surge that in recent weeks has taken over much of Idaho — a state with one of the nation's lowest vaccination rates.

"It's just nonstop trying to find placement for these patients and the care that they need," said Brian Whitlock, the president and CEO of the Idaho Hospital Association, who noted that hospitals across the state are struggling with the same issue. "It really is a minute-by-minute assessment of where beds are open, and hospitals saying we don't know where we're going to put the next one."

 

This will likely run it through all of the states with low vaccination rates. Delta is so wildly tranmissible it is inevitable.

 

I would tell anyone who's kids are wondering what it is they want to do for a living but want to be able to help people, have a job with unlimited job security and lots of career development options, look into nursing. While it is not by any means an easy job and is definitely prone to burn out, it does provide for a lot of self satisfaction and feelings of accomplishment. And if Covid has exposed one thing it's shown that the profession is very under paid for the responsibility it holds. I don't see putting that underpaid genie back in the bottle.

 

Dumb decision. An equally dumb decision is DeSantis not mandating that nursing home staff be vaccinated.

Florida nursing home staff have the second lowest vaccination rate in the nation:

Florida nursing home staff have second-lowest COVID vaccination rate in nation

And not coincidentally, Florida currently leads the nation in covid deaths amongst nursing home residents and staff:

Florida leads nation in nursing home resident and staff COVID-19 deaths

 

Wait, I thought it was only "Trumpsters" who didn't get vaccinated? I can assure you, "Trumpster" does not describe the vast majority of people working in nursing homes.

And why is it do you think that all nursing homes haven't mandated that all their employees be vaccinated by now?

 

Has literally nothing to do with the post you are responding to.

Because they are actually more concerned with making money than saving lives. There should be a mandate that nursing home employees be vaccinated. That's just no brainer common sense. DeSantis should have done that by now, but since he won't Biden is going to do it for him.

 

It is also one of the most serious injury prone jobs. Workers comp claims are high. Dealing with fat Americans all day long is hazardous to your health.

 

And potentially deadly if you're an unvaccinated nursing home worker.

 

AND with Baby Boomers iike myself approaching retirement age.............The country REALLY NEEDS for young people to go into the medical endeavors.

 

Sure it does.

Nope. Because nursing home jobs are thankless and not high paying and forcing these non-Trumpster, non-vaccinated workers to get vaccines can end up making the already understaffed nursing homes understaffed at crisis levels.

Personally, I think that all healthcare workers should get vaccinated and that healthcare companies should be permitted to make it a requirement of employment. BTW, Biden's mandate is for companies with more that 100 employees is it not? So 99 is OK? What's that rational?

 

simple - Economics.

 

Nope, it has nothing to do with anything.

They'd have to pay their employees more to retain them, and they should. They should pay more to get higher quality employees -- ones who aren't stupid enough to work in a nursing home while unvaccinated for covid.

Biden's nursing home mandate applies to any nursing home that receives funding from Medicaid or Medicare.

 

Tell me about it. Many times I come close to losing my patience with demanding patients who are morbidly obese and have literally eaten themselves into Hoverounds or being bed bound and ill. It's shocking to me how many morbidly obese patients are making it into their 80s and some even into their 90s. I had one Covid patient who was 78 and weighed 420 pounds. He came in complaining and demanding. I chalked it up to him being scared and tried to reassure him and calm him down. He basically told me that if he died it would be our fault. He was on 2 LPM and I told him not to worry he wasn't going to die. Sadly, he was dead in 4 days.

In the interest of respect for the dead I'm not going to tell a crazy and "funny in a gallows humor" kind of way story about this guy.

 

Yup. Sure it does.

This falls under...."If I Were King of the World!". It ain't happening. No one wants those jobs. The pay to entice a higher qualified caregiver would have to be at least 5 times the going rate now. And when you say "quality" what is it you mean?

 

At least 5 times higher? So someone making $15 an hour now would go to $75. That's complete nonsense that you're pulling out of your ass. Double the pay and see how many more folks would apply, and be more than willing to get vaccinated. And when I say 'quality' I mean someone who's not stupid enough to work in a nursing home while being unvaccinated.

 

florida has had, according to worldometer, only 9 total days above 300 deaths, the last august 28th, where do you get a 300 a day average from, only the last 2 weeks of august?

 

That is what worldmeter shows. Unfortunately Florida is reporting deaths in a misleading way, so we don't actually know.

We do know that cases peaked on the 27th, and deaths lag by about two weeks, so our peak for cases will end up being (several weeks from now after they finish all their reporting) somewhere around the 9th.

Current number of deaths for 9/9 is 60. A week from now it will be double that. Two weeks from now it will probably be over 300.