In Covid Surge, LA hospitals turn away ambulances and put patients in gift shops

If there's any truth to it, I can imagine the hospital's snack/convenience shop is being used. So it's not a neighborhood gift shop but some room in the hospital that sells a branded keychain. Definitely a click-baity title though.

https://www.wired.com/story/are-covid-patients-gasping-it-is...

There are no indications in this story where the capacity is coming from. What percentage of people are in the ICU for other conditions (heart attacks, car crashes, delaying treatment for conditions they needed surgery for months ago) vs infections? What are the percentage for flu, strep and other serious infections vs COVID? There's a lot missing in this article.

>The CEO of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, Dr. Elaine Batchlor, separately said patients there have spilled over into the gift shop and five tents outside the emergency department.

And, since the Federal government never stepped up to fund anything, no one is going to bother training personnel that they'll just get rid of in 12 months.

Santa Clara's hospitalization growth rate is running at 2-3 weeks.

This isn't something the health system can grow to solve.

They...did. There is a limit to the ability to magic up staffed medical facilities on short notice ex nihilo, however.

> They’ve been telling us it was going to get bad, then it did and they’re not prepared for it?

Had it not been predicted that it would exceed the potential to boost capacity, they would not have implemented the capacity-cobtingent statewide stay at home order (which is undermined by county sheriffs widespread and public non-enforcement stance.)

Keep in mind the surge we are seeing right now is from Thanksgiving. It is most likely going to get worse.

But in any case, in my opinion more should have been done, not less. Specifically, cut people a check so that they can afford to stay safely inside.

Highly doubtful. And you would have crushed your healthcare workers.

Even if everything we did just delayed the big spike until now, it's a HUGE win that healthcare workers are now getting vaccinated.

Because we took steps, this is not going to reach anywhere close to the same result in terms of deaths, even if it comes to equal cases. The solution to the time problem was more strict action earlier, ironically for most on the "economy" side of pandemic action. Give people a big stimulus, stop all jobs beyond food and true essentials, and enforce strict contract tracing. We might have been out of this in two months if we did that.

Our political leadership was too weak to make the decisions necessary to implement these solutions. Some readers may retort that lockdowns are a violation of democratic or constitutional freedoms, but there have been times in the past when these rights were suspended. During the civil war, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed people without a trial. In extreme situations, extreme actions may be warranted. (The US will soon have more Covid deaths than US soldiers died in all of WW2, if you think my war comparison is unfair). China took extreme actions to enforce lockdowns and successfully ended the spread of Covid. America's leadership decided that peoples lives did not matter, and did not.

Ultimately, I will be significantly more suspicious of any western politician who demands we go to war to protect lives, or give up liberties for personal safety. 2020 has shown that politicians would not take even the weakest measures to protect personal safety (e.g mask mandates) - exposing their lies in other domains as well. The war on terror was fiction. The war on drugs is a jobs program. And a 9/11 amount of deaths can happen every day and politicians will literally do nothing and people will demand nothing. I am deeply pessimistic about our future.

If we had perfect information, we could trace the liability back to people's behavior and fine them properly for non-compliance. But that would run up against privacy concerns wouldn't it?

What about a general strike by health care workers and grocery stockers and food delivery service workers? Right now. In the middle of a pandemic. Can you imagine the outrage? And why would people be outraged? Because they think these workers are slaves. They shouldn't have a choice. It's everyone who isn't on the front line who should get to choose whether to comply with public health orders.

It is certainly more civilized for health care workers to just quit en masse right now, than to propose people should just get to flaunt public health orders without any kind of penalty. But I'm getting the strong indication this is not a civil society.

I think one phrase from your comment highlights the entire problem though: “enforce no action.”

You can’t enforce a society wide shutdown. You can only get that from citizens who voluntarily participate in a social order that they trust. We (Americans) are faced with enormous problems as a society as a result of our inability to trust one another.

We may be able to engineer a zero trust replacement for our monetary system. We seem to desire the same thing for our society. Everyone demands infinite verification of everything. Fact check the fact checkers and audit the auditors that audit the election results! At some point though, it’s turtles all the way down. Political debate is starting to sound like epistemology.

It appears that societies that have greater levels of trust are faring better in this pandemic. That cannot become an excuse for our failure. It should instruct us on how to proceed.

EDIT: re-reading this I realize I’m singling out “society wide shutdown” as the sort of imagined best response, maybe it is, but what I was really thinking of was “highly coordinated society wide response where everyone does what they are supposed to based on their role.”

You can simply compare them to Denmark, Norway and Finland on infection rates, death toll and economic impact. If those countries manage to immunise their populations quickly then Sweden's approach was a huge failure in comparison.

But more to the point Sweden has now started trying to mandate restrictions and lockdowns as their health system is struggling and relying on public goodwill to do the right thing just isn't enough.

Total infections / capita is still lower in CA than in Florida.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25341289 [1] https://www.smchealth.org/health-officer-updates/december-7-...

It's a clear money grab too. They want this vaccine out because it opens the door to a ton of other mRNA treatments they haven't been able to get approved.

Further, this is very much a flattened curve. We could have easily seen 2 or more times the current rates of infection back then.

Yes, people are screwed up.

You have antimask morons protesting grocery stores. [1]

The goal of flattening the curve was to flatten the curve...we never really did that. We gave it a shot until everyone got bored or were deemed essential or had a pre-existing condition of being poor.

[1] https://citizen.com/-MPkpO03IQfFeYb_MLWT

In the convenience store or at the pump? If it's just at the pump, a lot of stations let you pay by card at the pump, it's outdoors, it's pretty easy to stay six feet from someone, and you're there less than 15 minutes.

I would gladly pay up to $1 (or 100 upvotes) for every comment I make here if only to prevent the steady decline into Reddit-style self-indulgent noise.

CA is still only 34th/50 per capita in infections and 40th/50 per capita in deaths.

We can't exclude outliers and expect to get a useful dataset. Especially when those outliers change all the time, and exhibit the same patterns as each other.

Also the fact that some of said states are near entirely run by people who have claimed that the virus did not exist from the start. I wonder how that may affect the transparency of data we get to see...

Oops, I mean, cognitive dissonance is cool.

Yes, they did.

And then the subsequent widespread public rebellion by county sheriffs, who lean very strongly to the political right and to whom state law invests exclusive and largely discretionary authority for enforcement of public health orders, that they simply would not enforce any of the orders also worked exactly as expected.

National media has tended to cover the state and regional public health orders, but not so much the very public announcements of non-enforcement by sheriffs. But they are extremely well distributed by local traditional and social media, and effect behavior.