I don't understand why hospitals aren't maintaining a minimum number of ICU beds for non-covid patients and preemptively turning away non-vaccinated covid patients to maintain that minimum availability.
Hospitals aren't going to turn away patients while they have open beds, period. Triage isn't about making moral judgments to favor future patients who may or may not be more deserving than someone in the ICU right now.
Regardless, it wouldn't work. The moment hospitals made being vaccinated a requirement for receiving care (which is horrific and would never happen), every single unvaccinated COVID patient would simply lie and say they were vaccinated. Hospitals aren't going to send critical patients home to come back with their vaccination cards before receiving care. The more you incentivize patients to lie in order to receive treatment, the worse things get.
You realize medical records are digitized and shared across medical institutions, right? I got vaccinated at a county clinic, but my health insurance provider still knew without me having to tell them.
Ultimately this is part and parcel of our privatized medical system where there were way more hospital beds per capita in the 70s/80s than today while costs have gone through the roof.
It's simple. You show, your dose gets straight to trash, all the papers are OK. Show up in couple months for the next "dose".
Source?
Could CVS have reported it to someone? Maybe. Did they? All evidence points to “no”.
How would this work if by getting vaccinated you get a record of the vaccination? The card everybody receives isn't the only record of vaccination. There's some database (or multiple). Hence why in California specifically you can look up your name and cross-reference it with where you received the vaccination and it'll show you your digital record along with a QR code that links to it.
What if someone claims they were vaccinated in another country without readily accessible records? Do you just turn them away? Doesn't work.
But seriously have you ever been to a hospital? Everything happens very slowly. When a patient is waiting around in the emergency room, there are many hours to make the decision where they're going next.
Also, are hospitals not still doing separate wards for Covid/not-Covid? A good first pass would be simply increasing the allocation for non-Covid.
No need to check ID, reality will do the heavy lifting for you.
https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/public-health/nearly-6...
But triage isn’t about being perfect, it’s about doing what you can quickly without second guessing it.
15:1 odds are good enough for a quick decision about who to prioritize.
Perfect is the enemy here, we just need to do the best we can, given the moments and information we have.
Edit: spelling
For example what if I was to claim there are really two distinct groups of 'unvaccinated' Covid people. Group A and Group B unvaccinated. Group A only contains 1 person and very clearly is not clogging up the hospitals. Someone claims to be 'Group A' unvaccinated and asserts their actions are not a problem because they are not clogging up the system.
A more realistic example is there are 20 smaller groups of people that in total are the same size as the Covid unvaccinated group but these groups have twice the risk as the unvaccinated group. If we make decisions based on group_size * risk then these groups are fine but we see that combined they have a much worse effect on capacity than the unvaccinated group. If we make decisions based solely on risk and not risk * group_size then the 'triage' protocol is going to make more sense.
Practically, you might have to treat groups differently because it's impossible to make efficient rules for a lot of small groups but ignoring the practical costs of rule making it is risk that is important not the size of the groups.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/04/us/chicago-mount-sinai-hospit...
There is one group who are consuming medical resources in such a way that it is limiting access for others. And the reason for this consumption is largely a personal decision to not take precautions that would prevent such consumption.
If 'gang banging' or any other elective activity (or lack thereof) were resulting in a similar situation, I think it would be right to explore the idea of limiting access for those making such decisions to ensure access for others.
edit: but as I understand it, this isn't meant to be a moral judgement, just giving the organ to someone who will get the most life from it. Maybe a distinction vs anti-vaxxers is that hospital staff don't expect choosing a vaccination or not to be a pattern that extends beyond this pandemic? or just that they haven't established a process? I don't know.
[0] https://www.medicinenet.com/medical_triage_code_tags_and_tri...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/28/hospitals-da...
https://time.com/5107984/hospitals-handling-burden-flu-patie...
That's just 5m of naive searching.
If I get what you are suggesting with your clever analogies, I'm actually OK with arresting the unvaccinated after they get treatment in a hospital. It would still act as a deterrent to not being vaccinated.
I find that the natural immunity crowd doesn't really understand natural immunity, they think it is the same as a vaccine and are surprised when re-infections occur so easily.
Perhaps you meant "gang members".
It sets the precedent of that hospitals can pick and choose.
The homeless, drug users, obese, all get accepted emergency care.
EDIT: The data is robust that the majority of unvaccinated patients who enter the ICU only exit via the morgue [3] [4], so medical criteria is being used in evaluating who does or does not receive care. This is not politics, this is objective science.
[1] https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/crisis-stand...
[2] https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/news/2021-09-07/idaho-...
[3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
The current weekly average for covid deaths is 1,077 [1].
Weekly hospitalization rates have been over 80K for the past few weeks [2].
97% of covid related deaths are unvaccinated.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...
[2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#hospitalizations
We disagree on the numbers that represent a death sentence. The numbers are objective. Your risk assessment is subjective.
Not necessarily a death sentence.
Especially if you’re in a younger cohort.
COVID is agnostically treated alongside those protocols. So if COVID symptoms are severe enough to bump the priority of a bed, then the worst person gets the bed. And as capacity is filled up, more triage and rationing of care/equipment for the worst patients takes priority.
Making a two-track quota/rationing of care based on the source of distress is a poor precedent for health care.
> https://www.benefitspro.com/2021/08/12/10-states-where-covid...
You ever hear a lawyer say something like "don't be the case law"?
That's why.
30% of capacity - Priority 1: normal emergency use (it's a hospital, this isn't an oxymoron)
20% of normal OR infectious capacity - Priority 2: vaccinated but breakthrough covid.
50% of infectious capacity - Priority 3: anyone else including unvaxed covid patients.
> https://www.benefitspro.com/2021/08/12/10-states-where-covid...