Comment by goodells | Hacker News Reader

Comment by goodells | Hacker News Reader

I am an EMT and talk to a lot of nurses, PAs, and physicians in various circles. This wave is worse for a few reasons.

- Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients. They aren't victims here, they did this to themselves. Nobody can muster any more compassion, especially for these people. Patients and people at large, not even just the total-nutjob anti-vaxxers, are tired of restrictions. "Things are opened back up, I deserve to have a good time."

- Staffing shortages building over the pandemic are making nurses hate the hospital administrations even more than before. Many were furloughed or laid off 6-12 months ago, and are now asked to work mandatory overtime with ridiculously unsafe nurse:patient ratios.

- ... all while traveling contract nurses and providers are being utilized by the hospitals at a pay rate 3-4 times what staff are paid. Many nurses are leaving their jobs that pay $30/hour to take a traveling assignment at $90+/hour. These people are working side by side, there's disdain towards the travelers, but who cares they're making bank.

- The "healthcare heroes" messaging is so obviously just a scam and the healthcare staff are now almost 18 months into a kafkaesque, double-speak nightmare. Previously this was reserved for veterans, and of course they were similarly screwed.

It's all just been building up since the beginning of the pandemic - issues with skilled staffing are very real and happening across the country.

You know you're getting a bad deal when politicians start calling your profession "heroes".

Just like having "Democratic" or "People's"/"Popular" in its official name makes a country less democratic.

Democratic Republic = Dictatorship

Any corporate culture messaging is a scam really. A company cares with its money (and this can be shown in working you less too, so not just cash comp). No money, they don't care about you.

Not true. A company can pay 50% over market and have a complete trash culture that burns people out in weeks. Not being total assholes is also a form of soft comp that doesn’t get enough recognition.

I do realize “pay me more” is a balm that is acceptable to many, but I actually like to enjoy what I do.

That is why I put "working you less too" in there. Either paying you more or letting you do less has a cost to the company.

The speech about "our caring culture" doesn't.

I could get payed a decent bit more and have decent benefits elsewhere but how nice and flexible my boss is makes it worth staying. I don't see how that's a "scam", I like it here.

The rate for traveling nurses is indeed ridiculously high as compared to full-time on the ground nurses working their butt off.

Are the traveling nurses also not working their butt off?

I'm not sure anything in my statement is meant to say they don't work their butt off?

My bad, I read it as traveling nurse price is too high because the latter work their butt off, implying the others do not.

Fwiw my Uncle is a nurse in North NJ and says this “wave” is nothing. Small uptick over last summer. Nothing like last April when it first hit.

Your Uncle needs to understand that just because North NJ isn't seeing much of a surge, doesn't mean there isn't a surge. The surge is happening on the Gulf Coast, Arkansas, and Missouri.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

There are plenty of healthcare staff vocally unvaccinated in Louisiana themselves, I wonder how they feel about those patients.

> - Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients.

In addition to this, I’ve also heard anecdotally that many of the unvaccinated (by choice) patients have animosity towards the healthcare workers themselves because the patients see this virus as politicized.

Overall I can imagine that it’s resulted in a more-hostile-than-average working environment which is bound to be stressful.

> patients see this virus as politicized

Unfortunately they are correct on this, this pandemic has been heavily politicized in the States, which imo was a very wrong thing to do. They tried the same thing in my country (Eastern-Europe), with a political party blasting their logos on “vaccine information” tents installed on the sidewalks but fortunately it hasn’t caught on that well.

Vaccination rates are extremely poor among Nurses and other healthcare staff[1], poorer than the general population you seem to imply they despise for lack of vaccination.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/judystone/2021/06/28/covid19-va...

This is false.

"Among practicing physicians, 96% have been vaccinated. The rate drops to <50% among nurses"

Arkansas, where this story is taking place, has only a 37% vaccination rate among the general population.

I'm guessing if you have already had the virus then the pressure is off.

> Healthcare staff have great animosity towards the unvaccinated patients. They aren't victims here, they did this to themselves.

That seems strange to me considering there are TONS of diseases that are completely the victims fault. Diabetes, heart diseases, lung issues, etc can all be caused because someone chose to make unfortunate decisions. Why would you get into a profession where you're in contact with this kind of person in a daily basis and then get upset that you come into contact with them?

Because those conditions are more complex; there is some choice, but it's not the full picture. Those conditions don't overflow the hospitals either. In the United States, any adult could get the vaccine for free for months now, and these patients chose not to. I fully understand why a healthcare worker would be struggling with empathy at a time like this.

1) No one with diabetes yells at you that “diabetes is a hoax” and tells you to fuck off as you intubate them. 2) the prevention/cure for diabetes is clear (weight loss) but extremely difficult (low success rates). The prevention for covid is extremely easy and requires almost zero sacrifice or change in habits.

Me and my colleagues have not heard a single patient beg for the vaccine, tell us to fuck off as we intubate them (if they're able to do that, they have to consent to it), and I haven't heard any of my staff do anything that suggests animosity toward unvaccinated patients. There is plenty of animosity toward the families of elderly, bedbound, nonverbal patients that demand they be hospitalized every time they "seem more confused than usual." The vast majority of nurses here are unvaccinated, but most had COVID-19 last year prior to the vaccine if the rumors I hear from them are true.

May I practice medicine in some outlier area, but all the headlines I've seen just seem to dramatize things. The one about the doctor who claimed she would tell patients "it's too late" then intubate them soundly particularly like bullshit.

One has a simple, free, and pretty readily available solution to prevent death. The others are not that black and white.

Eating healthy isn't difficult in a country like the United States and eating healthy prevents many medical issues. It seems pretty black and white from my point of view (I do understand that some issues are generic, those aren't what I'm discussing here).

Healthy food is expensive and time consuming to make, many Americans can't afford it and also don't easily have access to it.

Heard this many times but without detail. What exactly is expensive and time-consuming? Chicken/Beef, beans, pasta, rice, some greens, salt, pepper. Cooking simple dishes and putting them to a freezer can be done on weekend. What exactly is expensive and time consuming in US?

True, but Covid has the additional trait of being transmissible. It's reasonably likely that anyone sick enough to need hospitalization passed the infection on to someone else at some point. And it takes just a few minutes to almost completely eliminate the possibility of hospitalization for Covid, but obesity (for example) could take years.

If I could take two shots that prevented me from having Heart Disease and never having a heart attack that kills me, I would get those two shots.

Some people get T2 diabetes without being overweight, some lung cancer patients have never smoked. It's not "completely the victims fault".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com