Could this also be a result of forced vaccinations on healthcare workers (who were on the front lines for us early in the pandemic) who then move to states without mandates.
A CMS spokesperson told Fierce Healthcare that the agency is currently in the active rule-making process and cannot comment on any specifics of the pending healthcare provider regulations but did note that there will be a 60-day comment period immediately following its publication in the Federal Register.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/conflicting-feder...
If we look at the from-state/to-state patterns, we may see evidence, one way or the other, that vaccine mandates cause healthcare workers to change jobs. We may see that the mandates do not cause any significant change. Any significant change (15% or more) in the number of healthcare workers can result in a change in healthcare quality from one state to another. If quality of healthcare changes significantly (positively or negatively) in a state, due to vaccine mandates, I want to know: especially if it is in my state.
National data with regional breakdowns always lags by quite a bit, and unless there is institutional demand for such data, it just wont be collected at all.
One possibility is to look at BLS employment data by regions, but it's still really tricky to tease these types of effects out of that.
Pay, as the article states, seems to be a better explanation than a political boogeyman.
How is a mandate that some are against a 'boogeyman'? Is a law requiring employers to provide health insurance a 'boogeyman'?
These are simple things that obviously exist. And one nurse moving doesn't indicate much of anything.
Yes, I’m sure it’s a factor, and needlessly so considering the vaccine seems to have a negligible effect on transmission.
Prepared for my own downvotes after sharing some particularly uncomfortable truths.
If enough health care workers are willing to walk away from their jobs rather than take a vaccine, maybe you should take their observations seriously?
If you value their opinions in that way, you should get the vaccine.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-sur...
"The American Medical Association (AMA) today released a new survey (PDF) among practicing physicians that shows more than 96 percent of surveyed U.S. physicians have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19, with no significant difference in vaccination rates across regions. Of the physicians who are not yet vaccinated, an additional 45 percent do plan to get vaccinated."
That's because it's readily debunked. Nurses largely can't evade the vaccine mandates by moving; virtually all healthcare facilities are subject to the Federal vaccine mandate.
> Yes, I’m sure it’s a factor, and needlessly so considering the vaccine seems to have a negligible effect on transmission.
That doesn't seem to be true.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/vaccinated-people...
"Both vaccines reduced transmission, although they were more effective against the alpha variant compared to the delta variant. When infected with the delta variant, a given contact was 65 percent less likely to test positive if the person from whom the exposure occurred was fully vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. With AstraZeneca, a given contact was 36 percent less likely to test positive if the person from whom the exposure occurred was fully vaccinated."
The ERs in my city have been code red half the time for the last decade.
But the primary benefit of the vaccine is to reduce the burden on the healthcare system. The vast majority (mid-to-high-90%s) of hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated. It stands to reason that the more people running around without being vaccinated, the more people will get hospitalized. At a certain point, death is just a percentage of hospitalization, especially as you have places without beds that have to just turn people away. So fewer vaccines directly correlates to more deaths.
Speaking personally now, I don't care if people don't want to get vaccinated. I think it's idiotic, the vaccine is FDA approved now, hundreds of millions of people have gotten it and side effects are as rare or rarer than any other vaccine. But if you work with the public, especially in public health, schools, etc., there is a list of required vaccinations multiple pages long. Adding one more to the list isn't an encroachment on anyone's civil liberties, and you're free to move elsewhere, but that's not what's happening here.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/science-br...
Hospital systems are already overwhelmed, so having vaccinated staff reduces the amount of staff that have to miss shifts because they are dealing with covid symptoms.
Vaccines reduce symptoms, death and hospitalizations from covid complications. It's amazing to me that we have hospital staff that would rather listen to the Joe Rogans of the world than to the science they supposedly learned about in college.