Intimate portraits of a hospital Covid unit from a photojournalist-turned-nurse
npr.org
npr.org
Thank you to health care workers who keep grinding away to help others, and individuals like this who fight the ignorance and misinformation. You are heros in a time when we really need them.
If you got HIV from unprotected sex, should we shame you?
If you’re fat and get diabetes should we?
Etc etc. This is inhumane thinking and shouldn’t be encouraged.
Under crisis standards of care, the fact that you are fat can be used to allow you to die. Likewise, and especially, if you have diabetes, that will be cited as a reason why you were allowed to die. Likewise HIV or hepatitis, or any other health problem that you might have. Any health problem that makes you less than perfect can be cited as a reason why doctors might be allow you to die. Even a person with no known health conditions, but who is simply old, can have their age cited against them under crisis standards of care.
So it is understandable why some of us are angry with those who drove hospital after hospital to crisis standards of care during the later half of this pandemic, when there was a vaccine that could have completely changed the situation.
In a developed nation, we do not expect many situations to happen during out lifetimes that would drive a hospital to crisis standards of care. That some citizens recklessly put themselves into a situation where they could clog up the hospitals, to the point where the hospitals had to invoke crisis standards of care, demonstrates an amoral style of reasoning on their part.
This is already a matter of medical, policy, religious, and national history, and that story has not yet concluded with the many lives already ended. And if you knowingly expose people to HIV, that is generally both a criminal and civil matter. Meanwhile defiance of masks and avoidance of free vaccines is political patriotism — a brave defense of liberty itself.
HIV spreads more slowly so it doesn’t threaten to overwhelm hospitals, at least not in developed nations, but it is an ongoing pandemic which has killed at least 36 million people, including 680k in 2020, and is spread mostly by risky behavioral choices like drugs and unprotected sex. The social cost is incalculable let alone the costs to individuals and families!
So, I think the same principle applies and the same judgement ought to be given if any is given at all. Of course it shouldn’t, because the world is a mad house and we’re all inpatients.
If you vehemently oppose the use of condoms, physically and verbally assault people who try to distribute condoms in areas at high risk for HIV, retweet conspiracy theories about how HIV is not real and condoms were made by evil people for evil purposes, attack the doctors who are trying to treat HIV, etc., then yes: shame on you.
Not in a dehumanizing way, but cultural norms are sometimes there for a reason. As unfortunate as it is, being overweight is unhealthy, and while I don't think people should be looked at as less than human, they should know that their life choices are frowned upon.
Tangentally related: in some jurisdictions[1], not informing your partner that you have HIV and exposing them to the risk of infection is a criminal offense.
1. The United Kingdom, and New Zealand, if memory serves.
Diabete is frankly unclear since you can get it during childhood and again no way to alleviate it that people arent already massively taking.
>Long-term studies show the procedures result in significant long-term loss of weight, recovery from diabetes, improvement in cardiovascular risk factors, and a mortality reduction from 40% to 23%.
It is nothing like a vaccine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/health/25cnd-fat.html
You might be able to in the sense that it normalizes it. It's a little like how suicides can be "contagious."
And the person might not even need to be there physically, they could just be an image.
Do we need to publicly shame and ostracise employees of all advertising and marketing companies?
All ice-cream manufacturers?
What about smoking? Smoking kills 10 million per year, COVID is a pittance by comparison. Should smokers wear a yellow cigarette badge to distinguish them from others?
1 million die from the effects of second hand smoke - which can come off of clothes, even imperceptibly. Best to know about it, and give them a wide berth. Eg, probably a good idea ban them from going into shops at all. And from buying food, starve them out of the habit, eh?
Do remember here, COVID is NOTHING compared to smoking.
That is, by supporting such measures against COVID and not against smoking or any other preventable cause of death, you're effectively a "murderer".
As such, I'll be giving you and folks like you a wide berth myself, though I wouldn't go as far as restricting your ability to feed yourself.
No need to thank me, it's just common human decency.
Please put the nazi card back into the deck. You and I both know that we are not in nazi germany, nor is asking people to get a jab (and to accept that their actions - or inactions - have consequences) even remotely close to the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust.
I think the rest of your comment is worth responding to, and I will do so in a separate comment. However this is such an inappropriate comment that it deserves its own reply. I've linked some resources below where you can learn more about the Holocaust because it's clear that you're at least a little bit uninformed.
US Holocaust memorial museum - https://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust
National WWII museum - https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust
This one's geared towards educators (and unfortunately requires you to register) but has some excellent resources if you're willing to work through that - https://education.mjhnyc.org/
For your education, look up the several videos of holocaust survivors, and those who lives through other oppressive dictatorships, speaking out against what they perceive as a present-day repeat of exactly the conditions that lead to those horrors.
For example, any recent interview with Vera Sharav or any recent speech/press conference by Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes. (And if you don't find YT serving those up go to bitchute or odysee.)
And do bear in mind please, that one of the defining characteristics of the path to this level of societal degredation, is precisely that the majority of people at the time do not believe it could possibly be happening, and mock those who say it is, whilst simultaneously encouraging their silencing and censorship.
Ok? This doesn't _make_ anyone obese, while sitting on a train next to a COVID+ person gives you a pretty high likelihood of getting COVID.
That is, unless there's some new research that shows that simply seeing sugary deserts can turn people obese.
> Do we need to publicly shame and ostracise employees of all advertising and marketing companies?
??????
> All ice-cream manufacturers?
Should they stop marketing towards children? Absolutely. Again, I'm not entirely sure what you're going for here so I'm really just inserting a suggestion.
> What about smoking? Smoking kills 10 million per year, COVID is a pittance by comparison.
In the US but we have effectively banned indoor smoking on those grounds. In ATX you're not even allowed to smoke within (if I'm remembering the numbers correctly) 30 ft of an openable window of a business. Because it directly impacts people's health. Like spreading COVID does.
> 1 million die from the effects of second hand smoke - which can come off of clothes, even imperceptibly.
That's terrible, we should curb smoking if this is proven to be the case.
> Best to know about it, and give them a wide berth. Eg, probably a good idea ban them from going into shops at all. And from buying food, starve them out of the habit, eh?
what the fuck are you on about? root was talking about how people need to accept that they've contributed to the pandemic through their inaction, not advocating for barring people from shops. that's ridiculous.
> As such, I'll be giving you and folks like you a wide berth myself
I'm impressed- you've seemingly judged my entire character based on a single-sentence comment. Have you considered pursuing a career as a judge?
> though I wouldn't go as far as restricting your ability to feed yourself.
how gracious
A thought-experiment: how many people would be obese if it were impossible for manufacturers of unhealthy foods to market their products to anyone?
Look at the obesity levels in countries that such manufacturers exclude from their marketing campaigns.
The point is that advertising makes people do things they otherwise wouldn't have done. That's kind of the whole point of it.
It's an entirely valid and important argument for something such as obesity, that advertisers and manufacturers of obesity and diabetes-linked products, may play a major, even dominant and causal role in those diseases proliferation. How could people become obese, for example, to take it to an extreme, if there was nothing but healthy fruit, vegetables lean meat and water to buy - anywhere?
If you're a coder or engineer you'll know you find the faults of a system by pushing it to its extremes. Society/health and the struggles we face in those arenas are no different.
As for the pandemic, there are countries in "free Western Europe" that have violently arrested people for attempting to go and buy food. I've seen elderly assaulted, who - with trembling hands, hold their medical exemptions to merciless and uncaring store security, and a hopelessly split society pouring derision either upon the woman or the security staff. It's up to people such as ourselves to pick up the pieces.
These scenes are familiar to some of us, and people such as yourself discounting it is heartbreaking and frustrating.
Spend a little time rooting out what it is you're "not supposed to see". Maybe your perspective will shift. It's all there, if you're willing to look.
1. They reduce the chances you will get it because they increase the chances your system will fight it off before it gets established.
2. They reduce the time during which you are infectious, and the amount of the virus in your system that you output during that time. As a result they decreases the chances of you infecting others.
The reduction for the original variants was very significant. Vaccinated people were very unlikely to infect anyone else prior to Delta. With Delta the benefits were significantly reduced. With Omicron the benefits in infectiousness are again much reduced.
So for most of the last year the vaccines were a vital tool in reducing the spread of the virus as well as protecting the vaccinated. Now Omicron is so infectious the effect is much lower. Of course the vaccines do still seem to be real life savers against Omicron, and avoiding getting sick yourself still protects others by reducing the load on the health care system.
Transmission potential of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with the SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant in a federal prison, July—August 2021 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.11.12.21265796v...
> A total of 978 specimens were provided by 95 participants, of whom 78 (82%) were fully vaccinated and 17 (18%) were not fully vaccinated. No significant differences were detected in duration of RT-PCR positivity among fully vaccinated participants (median: 13 days) versus those not fully vaccinated (median: 13 days; p=0.50), or in duration of culture positivity (medians: 5 days and 5 days; p=0.29).
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/231557/covid-vaccines-effect...
I’m not entirely surprised there are studies with small numbers of participants in which it doesn’t show up.
Your conclusion is essentially the right one, the leading vaccines (particularly the mRNA vaccines) can dramatically lower the risk of a bad outcome if you catch SARS2. They do not stop the spead of the virus and do not ensure you won't catch it.
The amount of stress physically and mentally that nurses and doctors have been put through, by being exposed to covid themselves from the beginning, being separated from family, seeing people die every day is nuts.
And the amount of people still who basically talk about this like "oh the hospitals aren't even full yet, it's not that bad", and have done so repeatedly really is just plain sad. Also goes for the food workers and delivery people and anyone else who keeps things running.
Does your condemnation extend to them?
These people were putting their neck out almost a full year before the first shot was administeres. Chances are, many of them already acquired immunity via this route.
Not to mention, the body of evidence that point to the vaccines providing super-human immunity (i.e. better than natural) continues to grow.
Much of the original "natural immunity is the best" idea came from a single Israeli study.
No vaccine is perfect, and herd immunity (like we have for measles) would require nearly 100% coverage in all age groups - assuming it would even be possible for a virus like Covid.
Vaccines could have been used with NPIs instead of in place of NPIs, which could have given us a chance of containing Covid completely. Unfortunately, not least because of the anti science voices you seem to have been listening to, this was not possible.
As far as the unvaccinated getting hospitalized goes, well... do you have this amount of hatred towards the obese, too?
Regardless, your comment came across as pretty hostile, you seem to have a lot of hatred.
Nutrition education, access to healthy foods and the means to purchase them would be prevention. Then for treatment, long term dieting and exercise as well as systems to support that.
Treatment - eat less.
You should be very angry at them. If they eat less, they would not be such a burden on our health care right now.
If you are not angry, then you are very selective about it, and you are just cherry picking... double standard, and so forth.
In 10 years we will still be analyzing the health implications of the vaccine. And the effects on the health system
Also the unvaccinated tax not only is pay for the public health system, they are also pay for the vaccines, that give billions in profit to the pharmaceuticals, and has little to no benefit for all under 50
We as a race haven't eliminated a coronavirus yet, and we probably are not anytime soon, and hatred is starting against anyone weak enough to get bullied, because someone has to be made to pay. Gonna be a rough winter.
In any case these people are still humans. They have the same right to life as we all do.
If there is a underlying medical condition that is present then sure I agree. Everyone is allowed to make mistakes and shouldn’t be left to die because of it.
Let’s stop hating each other, love everyone even the anti-vaxers.
Unvaccinated people literally have smaller chance of survival.
Whether vaccination status is to be included in the triage point score is an ongoing debate -- it currently isn't: https://www.denverpost.com/2021/11/21/vaccination-status-col...
Unsafe and drunk drivers are quite condemned.
Obese people don't normally make hospital beds unavailable. If there was a safe, easy to take and effective vaccine against obesity, but they refused to take it, they would be condemned much more.
Plus none of them can infect others with their affliction.
Seriously? What about the good ol' "eat less" (excluding the rare cases where it is related to metabolism disorders)?
Losing weight is quite hard and keeping it off is next to impossible, given that very few succeed.
In case you're serious, you can read this. https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/11/a-chemical-hunger-p...
Eating less is both prevention and treatment.
[1] Excluding metabolic disorders
Drunk drivers are some of the most hated people in society.
Obesity can occur without own responsibility or at least be much more difficult to deal with for some people. It also doesn't infect people that walk past.
Yes, absolutely, 100%. There's a reason we have laws against those things: to condemn that behavior.
> obese people
The causes of the obesity pandemic in the developed world are too complicated to blanket say that all obese people are "reckless". Certainly some are though.
Don't you see where this is going ? Do you really want the government to dictate every single decision in your life, as soon as they're deemed "dangeours for the rest of the society" in one way or another ?
Now with omicron it’s spreading so fast that even though it seems to be less likely to put you in hospital, it’s infecting so many people the numbers in hospital are shooting up anyway. Vaccination is still saving huge numbers of lives here, but we are phasing in some limited lockdown rules as they become necessary.
On a personal note I caught the virus 2 weeks ago. I was pretty sick for a few days, but shook it off after a week thanks to being fully vaccinated. The rest of my family had it too and my reaction was the worst. I hate to think what it would have been like if I hadn’t had the vaccine working for me as well. I’d probably be dead.
It would likely have been worse if you weren't vaccinated, but not necessarily. It would almost certainly not killed you.
You just need to remember to add 'probably' or 'possibly' in front of most of your statements. People will accept them more, and your mind will be clearer and more rational.
At the very least though, the vaccination rate has a large effect on hospitalizations and deaths.
As to the obese and immuno-compromised also ending up in hospitals, many were born with a much higher than average risk for their conditions. Getting vaccinated is likely much easier than maintaining a healthy weight in this age of industrial "food" or being born without a high risk condition.
Obese people don't overwhelm hospital capacity because it is highly variable how long it takes for obesity to result in something that puts you in the hospital. Moderately obese people lose on average about 3 years of life. As far as hospital capacity goes the impact is that the people handling long term capacity planning have to change their forecasts to call for a little more capacity a little sooner.
Best of all isn't personal responsibility a classical conservative thing? Don't want to do something simple and free to keep yourself out of the hospital? Fine, but you get to pay for it.
Of course they will just go bankrupt and we'll end up paying for it anyway, but at least it will send a message.
Could be extended to other forms of adherence to flagrant health quackery. I have zero sympathy for this insanity anymore. If you get your health information from YouTube you are an idiot.
There’s a whole lot of reasons people end up in the hospital, plenty of which someone will conclude “well, that was more stupid than I’m comfortable paying for”, and having to do a full circumstances checkup to figure out which price and to whom to charge seems…problematic.
The unresearched whataboutisms in this thread are truly something else.
With the exception of drunk driving, the others do not directly pose an immediate risk to others.
Given that we're the ~only country in the world who insisted on kicking kids out of school long after it was shown that schools pose miniscule risk, this strikes me as a profoundly disingenuous remark.
Kids weren't deprived of education because someone refused to get a vaccine; they were deprived of education because we overreacted.
Well you're not the only country on the internet so...which country are you referring to? And how do you define "long after it was shown that schools pose miniscule risk"?
Seems to me many countries did this for a long time and at least in my country cases spike when schools open and infections spread to older family members. This is visible both in cases/deaths correlating with school reopenings + from what I've seen anecdotally.
There have been multiple studies showing that this isn't true. The evidence is simply overwhelming now.
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/01/three-st...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10235165/Teachers-N...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/opinion/omicron-schools-d...
Your feelings and perceptions of correlations are irrelevant and hopelessly confounded.
And apparently her natural immunity wasn't enough because she had caught COVID a year prior, also from school.
It's too bad she listened to all the idiots that convinced her that she didn't need a vaccine because natural immunity was best or that she was safe at school because kids don't really spread it. Had she listened to the actual experts, she likely would have lived and her children would still have a mother.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10235165/Teachers-N...
Meanwhile, there's no evidence for the "appropriate measures" (whatever those are) that you're using to cast allusions on the safety of schools. There's simply no evidence base to defend the claim that schools are unsafe, and a substantial evidence base showing the opposite.
Want to give elderly teachers leave or early retirement? Sure, fine. But especially after vaccination, the rest is complete theater.
> a friend of mine just caught Covid from the school she works at last week....framing the school closings as an overreaction to a minimal risk is incorrect and dangerous.
So...your friend caught covid, and therefore, everyone else is "incorrect and dangerous". Well, guess what: a friend of mine caught covid outside of work last week. So what's your point? That people get sick?
Also: how did your friend end up, again? You skipped over the part where a fully vaccinated person recovered from a mild illness with no problems.
Here are 3 studies from the CDC on the effect of Covid precautions on school outbreaks. The evidence does exist. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/p0924-school-masking...
"I've been told by patients' families [who can't come to visit] that we are making this up to drum up business at the hospital," says Bucko.
God, that must be so infuriating. When you’re as tired and stressed as these medical staff are, I don’t know how they can summon up the energy to deal with that. I’ve had a few conversations with friends about this, they’re mostly hesitant rather than fully down the rabbit hole, but every one of those conversations is totally draining.
At least in the US this kind of thinking makes some sense if you ever had the pleasure of dealing with insane hospital bills. They are greedy bastards.
It’s sad a lot of health workers are doing great work and sacrificing their health while working for morally corrupt institutions like hospitals.
The article then got flagged. There is some serious denial going on about the impact of COVID and I really don't understand what is driving that.
Money because restrictions shutdown the cashflows that support the rich in the lifestyle to which they've become accustomed.
Ideology because if we can come together to fix Covid, maybe we can come together to fix climate change and inequality. This is an anathema to those who believe that we should all carry on just as we please, because we can't do anything about these things anyway (and cashflows again).
I was thrilled to be vaccinated and in awe at the power of mRNA technology. I got everyone I knew that was un-techsavvy a vaccination appointment as early as possible.
With that being said...
I think we are coming to terms with our collective hubris. Omicron has caused many "breakthrough cases". The science would indicate that it either evolved in an immunocompromised human or through an animal. Those are particularly inconvenient paths to blame on "anti-vaxxers".
We were all always going to get Covid whether we liked to or not.
Regarding Omicron, there is some cause for hope: so far it does seem to produce less severe illnesses.
One of the main examples of hubris was that we thought we could stop it. The "success story" countries quickly dwindled to Australia and New Zealand--situations not exactly replicatable. Australia's hubris led to a bad vaccine rollout, and a few cases quickly escalated to lockdowns. I think NZ eventually settled on an endemic policy.
Note that China is still keeping Covid at bay.
I think there are parts of society like this almost everywhere, and that's why it's uncontainable once it hits a critical mass.
China is interesting. I guess they're doing it mostly through testing and restrictions that wouldn't work elsewhere? They have a good vaccination rate, but their vaccines aren't very effective. There's also North Korea; they claim zero cases. I imagine the real number is either surprisingly close or essentially 100%.
Why would one feel the need to blame anti-vaxxers for new strains?
> We were all always going to get Covid whether we liked to or not.
That’s not the point of vaccinations. The point of vaccination is to delay and spread out infection peaks as well as make infections as manageable as possible.
Just had an argument with a friend over the phone the other day: he lost an unvaccinated relative of Covid months ago, still refuses to get vaccinated although they soon will force him in order to keep his job, which makes him angry. His last words before I politely ended my probably last call to him were "you support vaccinations because you're a communist!". Nuff said.
The issue has become so divisive that should one day we discover it was orchestrated by someone, I'd be undecided between hanging that royal bastard to the highest pole with live TV coverage, or giving him a prize for managing to literally cut our society in two with minimum effort.
I find myself somewhere on this spectrum. I'd appreciate if you could read my comment and pick me apart on this because I hate the division too.
I never thought that coronavirus didn't exist, but I've always thought that it's "just a flu" (not literally, but figuratively, in the sense that Spanish Flu was just the flu, and now we're no longer immunologically naive).
In terms of the anti-vax stuff - well, I'm fully vaccinated, but I'd probably be considered "anti-vax" by a significant number of people because that I do not believe that it reduces transmission sufficiently to eliminate the virus if 100% took it - e.g. I think herd immunity is impossible, so to me it's 100% a personal risk.
Based on this, it makes me viciously angry when people back restrictions, lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, etcetera.
I see these people as being scientifically illiterate because they're willing to apply force in order to attempt to solve an unsolvable problem.
And as time passes I start to just stop paying attention and discount them as, well, being human. I just can't, for years at a time, listen to people spout arguments based on (what I consider to be) false premises and continually try to explain why they're wrong.
Either I get angry and lash out, or just meme it. Neither are particularly conducive to bridging a divide.
What is the solution to get out of this mess?
How do I make peace with someone who seems to be maniacally obsessed with something I consider to be a non-issue?
I don't expect here that either of us will convince each other, but yeah, WTF do we do? I fundamentally can't see the solution, like you say it's literally cut society in two, as if we now have completely different utility functions.
But even that is a hard sell to some people.