Hacker News Reader

Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, my home city's hospitals are so full that they're turning away people from the ER who have a low chance of survival, like heart attack victims.

It's gotten so bad that the military was called in to restore peace.

The doctors there were on a news segment, completely burnt out and in tears, saying that 0% of their COVID patients are vaccinated and they're overrun.

So I believe this metric.

View on HN

Is this actually true? Would you care to name the city?

Sorry for being sceptical, but I've seen similar claims propagated on twitter "hospital so full, that gunshot victims are turned away". It was untrue both on accounts of being full and there being any gunshot victims.

Google “COVID triage”. Several us states and Canadian provinces have airlifted COVID cases to different places that have open beds. Elective surgery was on hold, and even procedures involving nursing participation were not occurring. Fortunately the current wave seems to be stabilizing at least here in Canada.

https://youtu.be/TZICprwPNbI

Why do the vaccinated accept this? Honest question, because I imagined the breaking point for vaccinated folks to be before there's literally zero space for their medical emergencies due to folks who made a different choice.

I mean, you don't want anyone left behind. But if you're forced to leave someone behind, the question becomes "who?". If you have one emergency bed and in comes a drunk driver from an accident, shortly followed by the pregnant woman he ran over, I'm not a big fan of "first come, first served".

If and when doctors are forced into heinous choices, I'd think such considerations should play a role - for society allocating scarce resources, at the very least.

I agree, so long as we’re not expecting doctors to do triage, which I believe they generally don’t. Triage is generally don’t by specially trained nurses, as I understand it.

Can we trust a nurse who refuses to be vaccinated to do the Right Thing at this moment?

I meant “generally done by”

IANAD and don't have a great source for this, but I've both heard and read about some variety of "professional code" or "best practices" where MDs are expected to leave their personal convictions aside when deciding and prioritizing who gets what care.

I may personally agree with the exact situation you describe, but relying on "common sense" breaks fast at scale. If the doctor(s) making the call are devout adherents of some religious sect, would you prefer that they prioritize the drunken driver above the pregnant woman who needs an abortion of the child that was conceived out of bedlock?

Or denying care to the heroin addict ODing?

IMO, completely removing moral judgment from the medical evaluation process is a net positive.

This doesn't have to mean "first come, first serve", and I assume it doesn't in most places.

What steps have your local hospitals taken to increase capacity since the pandemic began nearly two years ago? Our for-profit healthcare system is tuned to extract and retain as much wealth as possible, not provide as much care as possible. Any unused capacity goes against that goal.

Considering many hospitals seem to be in a perpetual construction mode what else can they do? You can only build and more importantly staff new buildings so quickly and two years isn't going to cut it for that

"A construction expert broke down how China built an emergency hospital to treat Wuhan coronavirus patients in just 10 days"

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-managed-build-enti...

Good luck for them, this is absolutely terrible for your doctors. Hope they get help from neighbors with their kids and groceries.

Biggest thing is they're basically out of masks, gloves, etc. and are sleeping at the hospital at this point. The hospitals won't pay to get them better break rooms and until recently didn't even have a great place to sleep.

Past tense or present tense? It's unbelievable for me that at this point folks in North America remain unvaccinated.

Which town?

I don't like to say online but it's in NW USA.

What the, I was thinking you would say Romania, I just read vaccination is only 30% over there and they are planning to move patients to neighboring countries.

I've been told to quarantine because I had COVID symptoms. From the vaccine. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

From which vaccine? There are a number of vaccines, and it is expected for the body to "fall ill" a bit since the anti-bodies are being built. This is usually the case with all vaccines in general. I was an infact when I had received the various mandatory vaccines in India, but I recall taking the yellow fever vaccine when I was 32 and I had five days of fever

Similarly, I had a fever + 4 days of 20 hours of sleep after receiving the second Pfizer-Biontech dose.

How do you know they’re from the vaccine?

He can't be sure of it, but it's the way it works, so its expected. Also, 2nd dose usually causes a stronger reaction from the body (you get the symptoms without the risks).

See https://xkcd.com/2425

Makes sense. The vaccine can cause those symptoms, but they could also be due to you catching COVID just before receiving the vaccine.

all throughout the pandemic i visited with nurses, emts and have even been in many hospitals here in seattle and surrounding areas. you know, ground zero or first reported spot.. the hospitals were empty, still are and they were laying people off right and left. but yeah i guess i kept missing the rush or was at the wrong hospitals. it was strange

Why and how were you at so many hospitals? Providing more context could explain what you experienced.

During an infection disease emergency you don't want random people at a hospital.

Hospitals aren't giant ICUs.

In a large teaching hospital where I did some consulting work, a plurality of people at the hospital site were visitors (followed by staff, then patients). It is not surprising that hospitals feel empty when you remove most of the people in them.

thats true, i just kept meeting personal who told me otherwise, they weren't conspiracy theorist either, this was before all that started. i actually dated one nurse for a bit she was super bored at work half the time. not saying thats a bad thing, i just would watch tv, hear one thing and then experience something entirely different but you've been around it and saw something different so i just might have been there during weird times or something idk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com