Central and Southern California have 0 percent ICU capacity | Hacker News Reader

Central and Southern California have 0 percent ICU capacity

nytimes.com

36 pointsNoRagrets29 comments

I recently lost my trust in humanity to Covid. So many people are willfully ignorant, shamelessly dumb and maliciously defending the first position they took. So many people refuse to learn, unlearn and relearn anything after a certain age. Even friends who I held in high regards seem to stick to opinions based on misinformation that ignores every sense of reality. So many cults and subcults are holding humanity back.

I have not lost anyone to Covid yet. So for me personally, this is the biggest loss so far.

It’s interesting that one can read your entire comment and not know the particular position you take regarding COVID and the appropriate response to it.

I could see this comment describing frustration with people who refuse to take social distancing and mask wearing precautions. But I could also see it describing frustration with mask / lockdown mandates and economic effects.

I can even see it describing frustration with anyone who isn’t weighing all those concerns in their nuances.

Absolutely.. and what makes me sometimes doubt humanity are statements like GP's, where people just have _some_ position and act like it is the only one that is even worth considering. It's not even necessary to clarify what their position actually is. You just have to know because it's the only valid one.

I don't know why but over the last decade this intensified.. everyone is so damn sure of himself and his views..

The biggest problem is that people seem unwilling to change their mind. People base their whole identity on their opinions and it’s getting worse.

I think it’s because the internet allows the people who have dumb ideas to meet other likeminded people. They can now form groups. And now it’s harder to be open to other opinions, because the existence of your group validates your opinion.

Check Facebook Groups. It’s a cesspool.

We've had a year at this point to prepare. Was there any effort to ramp up additional temporary facilities? Is it ICU beds, equipment or healthcare workers where we are falling short? From what I've read, the need for ventilator seems to be non-issue due to early stage hospitalization protocol changes. Maybe it's not publicized, but it seems stay home was the only step A, with no step B. The time that bought us seems to have been wasted.

It is nurses and doctors that are the limiting resource. That pipe cannot be increased easily.

I keep wondering where are the hospital ships? The military doctors and nurses?

Looks like it’s been in Portland since July: https://www.myshiptracking.com/vessels/usns-mercy-mmsi-36781...

Yet Oregon doesn’t seem to be in such dire straights as CA: https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2020/12/coronavirus-in-orego...

A lot of "civilian" doctors and nurses are the military doctors and nurses, in the reserves.

>We've had a year at this point to prepare. Was there any effort to ramp up additional temporary facilities? [...] Maybe it's not publicized, but it seems stay home was the only step A, with no step B. The time that bought us seems to have been wasted.

That was the plan? As in, do lockdown, prepare hospitals, then lift lockdown and let the disease sweep through the country until we reach herd immunity? That would have resulted in hundreds of thousands or even millions of deaths. I always thought the plan was: lock down, wait until vaccine, get everyone vaccinated, then lift lock down.

The plan was always iterative lockdowns, followed by loosening of restrictions, as the virus is much more deadly when hospitals are overwhelmed. The earliest studies and models clearly recommend this as widespread natural immunity is a guaranteed way though and a successful vaccine is not.

Human nature and politics have played their role, from both directions, for better or worse. So we’re all just betting on a vaccine, now.

> I always thought the plan was: lock down, wait until vaccine, get everyone vaccinated, then lift lock down.

"Lockdown" were always sold as in "flattening the curve, not "wait for a vaccine".

And this is an entirely reasonable position to adopt when you do not yet know, as was the case in early 2020, how long a vaccine will take to develop, or if one can be developed at all.

Perhaps the issue is that there is simply no money left.

“I again asked for the grade he would give himself.

“I give ourselves an A. But the grade is incomplete, and I’ll tell you why. If we come up with the vaccines and therapeutics, then I give myself an A-plus.”

...

“He wanted to make sure I had the list of his accomplishments.

But on the issues before you, I said, “You know what number one is? The virus. Number two’s the virus. Number three is the virus.”

Then he displayed his ambivalence about his role again. “No, no,” he said first and then added, “I agree with that.” Then he added, “But that was thrown upon me when we were riding high. The election was over. I was going to win easily. And all of a sudden we got hit with the China virus. And now I’m working my ass off.” And he abruptly said, “So long, Bob. Good luck.”

—Excerpt From Rage by Bob Woodward

I think even worse than the lying and insanity of the contents of the interviews, is that so-called master negotiator Donald Trump genuinely believes he is playing a blinder by getting Woodward on his side by effectively confessing over the phone.

Good job he's leaving, with all that debt kicking in next year.

Here is what remains unsaid..the central California (and Southern California) hospitals that are full capacity..almost all of them are in farming regions of central California: https://apnews.com/article/public-health-california-coronavi...

Farmworkers are disproportionately affected due to covid because they have to keep going. They live together cramped in rooms and are transported to fields together. There is no concept of ‘social distancing’

This is also the population that would be most skeptical towards the vaccine.

We needed automation 9 months ago. Food shortages are a real possibility in 2021 when we will have no picking crews.

Hard truth and straight talk: most farm labour is brought across the border by coyotes. It’s not politically correct to say it..but here you have it. Not many people will be crossing the border in 2021.

Not that most food imports will cross the border either. Lettuce is not food.

For everyone who pooh pooh’ed farm robotics and automation because it wasn’t going to be profitable enough..well our food is going to become real expensive real soon.

And what little data harvesting tech they have developed..too little ..too late.

This is pretty much the Thanksgiving fallout. Or what I will now call Thanks-for-giving-me-covid.

AMA continues to befuddle me. If everyone started taking 4000 IU of Vitamin D today, there would be a 10x fall in deaths. And it's available immediately. That will help get the vaccine distributed and reduce the death and admission rate in the mean time.

Also, there are now reports that anything that can trigger an igA response will also kill the virus. Apparently covid is rather easy to kill but we're not doing anything intelligent as a species to stop it.

There have been many studies that give people a few hundred IU per day (versus a few thousand) of Vit D that show little real benefit, tragically. This leads people to believe - through the pretense of knowledge - that Vit D supplements are useless. Combine that with high faith in "science" as if studies can't ever be poorly designed and blammo now you have experts telling people it's a waste of money that makes your pee expensive. It's truly sad.

Just Google "vitamins are useless" to see what's getting turned out.

Edit: personally I feel it's like giving starving people 200 cal per day of food, seeing that they die anyhow and saying "look food doesn't work to fix starvation!" yeah maybe not, but at what dose? If the dose makes the poison perhaps the dose also makes the medicine

>AMA continues to befuddle me. If everyone started taking 4000 IU of Vitamin D today, there would be a 10x fall in deaths.

source?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096007602...

"Of 50 patients treated with calcifediol, one required admission to the ICU (2%), while of 26 untreated patients, 13 required admission (50 %)"

So the effect was in this case 25x. HN discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24366006

Not OP but maybe they were thinking of this one: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.201912

A couple ways they can improve this: 1. Temporarily delay elective procedures like we did in the first lockdown 2. Bump up the nurse to patient ratio from 2:1 to 3:1

Scheduled procedures don't generally take up ICU space.

sorry I meant elective procedures

Same deal.

If something is not urgent enough to happen RIGHT NOW it isn't going to require an ICU bed unless things go very sideways.

Pre-op and recovery are not ICU.

ICU is where people go from the ER.

One would think that a one-party government could have reacted better, or at least foresaw better.

Wow, simply a tragedy. It seems as though the majority of people(Southern California especially) did not adhere to safety guidelines. They virtually brought it upon themselves.

True, but while the behavior (and rate of spread) is from the population as a whole, the impact is felt by individuals. Someone who's staying home except to get essentials once a month is at significantly increased risk when they visit stores if there are more carriers - and of course someone who's staying home and develops a medical emergency completely unrelated to covid won't have an ICU bed either.

Or, alternately, hospital administration is doing an excellent job of optimizing for revenue by oversubscribing their biggest profit center.

SoCal hospitals have been infamous for sending any baby they can to the NICU for any reason so long as the parents have insurance, because regular L&D is a cost center. Is adult ICU really that different?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com