Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonpeacock | Hacker News Reader

When hospitalization rates are down. In many metro areas the ICU are still full of un-vaccinated COVID patients, which means people with normal emergencies can't get a bed.

Thus, COVID precautions are necessary to reduce the rate of infection to levels that do not overwhelm the healthcare system.

And all those areas that have "returned to normal" are sending their COVID patients to regions that are still masking because they've exhausted their local ICU capacity.

View on HN

>And all those areas that have "returned to normal" are sending their COVID patients to regions that are still masking because they've exhausted their local ICU capacity.

This has been my experience as well. My state is pretty strict overall, but my area of my state is not.

Our hospital has been operating at capacity for 6 months or so, but nobody is talking about it. Because we can just ship to where they have stricter COVID control measures.

We're causing problems for other people because we can't be bothered to be part of society.

It's a joke all around. The entire world. Nihilism is almost impossible to escape right now.

It’s pretty amazing how stupid and shortsighted people are. We’re so good at overlooking the horrible situation we’re in and focusing on other things that are completely irrelevant

I used to think that one of the worst things in the USA was that 100 people per day die in preventable car accidents, but now we’re getting 10x that from a virus and people pretend that it isn’t happening

The last two years have convinced me: When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, zombies are biting and killing people in the streets, and neighborhoods are burning down, 50% of the country (world?) will whistle and just continue to go about their day, shopping, going out to eat, sending their kids to school, and looking down at all those hysterical alarmists bunkering up trying to defend themselves from the hoard. "Government, don't force me to change my life! I have the freedom to pretend everything is normal!"

Haha I've had this conversation with my wife as well. We've basically been under house arrest since early February 2020 (yes we quarantined even before there was a quarantine) and taking very conservative measures since, always 1 step ahead of the CDC the whole time with double masking and still masking when mandates were lifted here in Oregon because we knew there would be an immediate re-surge.

I told my wife I used to think we'd be one of the first to die in the Zombie Apocalypse because her and my kids are all high-anxiety people that typically crumble with too much psychological pressure. Yet covid has shown me we'd actually be one of the longest survivors given our resilience so far and how we haven't caved into the pressures of society itching to get back to normal. My dad - a self-proclaimed "survivalist" and doomsday prepper didn't make it even two months before he gave up on quarantining. He said the psychological stress was too much, he couldn't handle it lol

Unless you have significant risk factors, this is unnecessary. Most people don't and/or took care of business.

At least buy BSL-3 suits (PAPR/P100 helmets, gloves, splash resistant suits) and get on with your life, I assume you can afford it.

Based on the photos I can find of BSL-3 suits, I highly doubt that others on the street or in stores would let them "get on with their lives" :-))

You survived because... most people (>99% of infected individuals) survive Covid? lol. If this was your end of the world scenario (people dining everywhere because you know... if you sit the virus goes past you) then you are up for a rude awakening if a real crisis ever arises (which I hope it doesn't)

That's the beautiful part of humans, though, we push through and live our lives no matter what. If everyone panicked every time there was something that seemed apocalypse, then we probably wouldn't be where we are today. Maybe it's just the resilient ones that survive and keep reproducing.

I am wary of stories like this. What you’re saying is probably true true in specific cases in the most populous cities in the country, but I don’t think it’s a general policy that makes sense across the board.

I live in South Carolina & their Department of health website has great data. As of today, there are currently 551 Covid patients hospitalized statewide. 1280 ICU beds are occupied for a 76% utilization rate. Of those beds, 150 are Covid patients. That means 88% of folks in ICU are non-covid related.

https://scdhec.gov/covid19/covid-19-data/acute-hospital-bed-...

This data doesn’t exactly corroborate what your saying. The way you tell it, the ICUs are still overflowing with Covid, and they just aren’t. Not in SC at least. And we’re not exactly known for our stringent Covid restrictions.

Maybe not today, but the peak of the most recent wave in South Carolina was in September and saw about 2500 people hospitalized statewide.

Here's "hospital stress" data for the US, showing where COVID patients are overwhelming the healthcare systems:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/09/9443799...

Would be interesting to see how that data compares with other diseases. For instance heart disease, which is largely preventable and kills more people

I think altering your diet and lifestyle to prevent heart disease (assuming it's non-heritable) is harder than getting two shots to prevent COVID.

3 shots now, Israel is preparing for 4th...

That website is very much designed to be scary. They say that hospital admins think 30% and above of Covid patients mean "extreme", but they use 20% and above for the "extreme" red. Then below that they use % "extreme", but without close reading, you think they are talking about hospital capacity. Over the whole map it's hard to find any county with over 20% of their beds being Covid patients. The big thing is what did all of this look like before Covid? Most of the problems with capacity are due to staffing, which seems to be the real bottle-neck here.

Can you point me to a mandate anywhere with some kind of hospitalization rate cutoff? Because everywhere where there are still mask mandates, they seem to be nebulous things that will just last until it’s no longer politically popular. Oregon for example set an arbitrary date, which of course makes no sense.

Bay area (note that there are additional criteria): https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/Bay-Area-mask-man...

Does LA County have anything like this? I haven't been able to find it.

Just eight Bay area counties ("San Francisco, Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo, Contra Costa, Marin, Sonoma and Napa" from https://www.sfgate.com/bay-area-politics/article/Bay-Area-ma...; Solano is not included as they have chosen not to reinstate a mask mandate)

The medical cartel has had 2 years to adapt at this point. How have they failed to scale capacity despite charging record prices?

If they scale then the politicians won't have an excuse to maintain their mandates. They were able to get navy ships with hundreds of beds scaled up in weeks at the start of the pandemic. The cost to society of the mandates is certainly more that it would cost to scale ICUs.

During WW2 the US managed to mass produce about as much fighter planes as it needed.

It couldn't mass produce fighter pilots, though.

ICU capacity is not that interesting to me anymore. Most hospitals don’t have row after row after row of empty ICU beds most of the time. They actually want their ICU to have just the right number of beds. 70% capacity sounds full, but it means 30% of the beds are empty. Would it ever make sense for a hospital to have 99% capacity free? Just have 99 beds empty for 1 patient? I think it’s a scare number.

Aren't the unvaccinated people in ICUs already not following COVID mandates? In areas of Southern California (e.g. Temecula) with low vaccination rates, there are virtually no restrictions. Why restrict a compliant populace that is already mostly vaccinated?

In the US the nation-wide ICU vacancy is down to pre-pandemic levels. There may be anecdotes of individual hospitals that have a lot of COVID patients in ICU, but it's simply not true that this is a wide spread problem.

It's funny that people read the same data with such different interpretations. This is why I feel like the insistence of "just look at the data" rarely leads to a clear decision, and anyone working at a company that has dealt with giving data to people to make decisions will know this intimately. People use data to make their point, and if the data doesn't agree, then they slice it or adjust it or reason their way out of using it, so they can make the decision they want. I think Scott Adams calls it "watching the same screen, but seeing two different movies"

There are several problems, but a big one is just the way the news works. ICUs are designed to run at near capacity and are overwhelmed all the time if, for example, there's a big car accident. Right now, all eyes are on the pandemic and I'm sure it's true that there's places in the country where ICUs are full up with pandemic patients. But the way the news cycle works, "ICUs at capacity with COVID patients" gets a lot more clicks than "ICUs in this hospital are always at capacity, but now they are at capacity with COVID."

Also, there's been a couple of big hoaxes that have circulated like the one about how ERs were full of Ivermectin ODs and they were turning away car accident victims.

Here's the actual real-time-ish data of ICUs for the country:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...

Right now the national average for ICUs is 68% occupancy. Also from that article:

>The national average I.C.U. occupancy in 2010 was 67 percent, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, though the occupancy baseline changes depending on the place, time of year and size of hospital.

I mean, big car accidents don't happen across multiple states at the same time, it isn't that surprising that the response to something happening super-regionally is different than the response to something happening locally.

Did you miss this part?

>I'm sure it's true that there's places in the country where ICUs are full up with pandemic patients.

No, I didn't miss it, I was responding to the cynicism about "the news cycle", that's why I pointed out that a pandemic is a different sort of thing than a car accident.

If you are operating at your normal capacity factor but have reason to predict that you are on a trajectory to be completely overwhelmed along with every hospital within reasonable driving distance, it's different than if you are operating at your normal capacity factor and have to send a patient or two to the nearest hospital with more spare capacity.

Your response would make sense if we were still in the first months of the pandemic when there was serious risk of overrunning the hospitals.

Covid is still very real. And there are still very real risks. But this fear of overrun ICUs is irrational nonsense. We are back to pre-pandemic ICU utilization. And we have been since before the Delta variant hit.

The head internist at my local hospital participated in a news story about how everyone that works there is sick of it all just last month. This is at a small hospital that usually deals with a few patients at a time. They've had periods where they had limited space and couldn't make transfers since Delta hit.

But maybe the media called every hospital in the state to find her or something.

We are scraping by with the measures we do have in place, we can't use the fact that we are successfully scraping by as evidence that we have too many measures in place.

It's simply dishonest for you or anyone else to pretend like COVID filling up ICUs is a wide spread problem. There may be anecdotes of it being true in a particular hospital or community. But nationwide we are back to pre-pandemic occupancy levels.

I don't understand why you extrapolated that data to suggest something about how many measures we have in place. Is your position that we should lie to the public so they will do what you want?

I feel like we are talking past each other and you are putting words in my mouth (and calling me a liar), so whatever.

ICUs typically run around 85% occupancy and up. At 68% it is difficult to pay the bills.

People have a hard time accepting that we are no longer in the early panic stage of the pandemic. Any data that suggests we can ratchet down the anxiety driven fear porn a couple points will be dismissed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com