From my perspective in the US the lockdowns were about managing hospital capacity. While this might disproportionally benefited older folks, hospitals are a service anyone could need at any time for a wide range of reasons.
And yet there is scant evidence hospitals ever were at risk. We should have relaxed our approach to all this when cities across the country were closing their unused field hospitals. Instead of celebrating the fact that covid wasn't nearly as lethal as the earliest models predicted, governors across the country doubled down on their covid restrictions. Two years later, they are finally almost gone.
Did any of these restrictions provide enough benefit to justify their immense social cost? It will probably take much cooler heads to find out. It troubles me that we went into this mess with little understanding if the measures even worked. In effect, we took millions and millions of people and had them partake in a massive uncontrolled experiment without anybody's consent.
I know several people who had to delay surgeries and other medical procedures because of hospital capacity due to COVID.
I know multiple nurses and doctors who were re-assigned to help with COVID patients, or came out of retirement to help with staffing shortages.
But I’d wager a lot of money that I’m right and most of the hospital issues were self-created problems caused by testing everything with a pulse. That’s my hypothesis and I’m sticking to it!
What? Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures. Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave.
I don't recall this happening. Can you provide a source for this?
I've yet to see any kind of actual study that compares hospital capacity during these "surges" vs hospital capacity in the "before times". Also I strongly suspect future research will show that most of the hospital issues were self-inflicted wounds. We tested everybody who came into the hospital and invoked crazy high-overhead processes for positive results irregardless of symptoms.
The entire two years of this I've been waiting for a single instance of an overflowing hospital with stretchers of people out the door... never seen one yet. There has never been a real issue of hospital capacity--at least in the US anyway.
I mean, I don't know about you but I certainly do not consider this normal: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2022/01/13/er_slammed-getty...
Image caption is: "A nurse walks inside a temporary emergency room, built into a parking garage at Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center in Tarzana, Calif., on Jan. 3, 2021. Since Thanksgiving, cases have risen to the point where 80% of the hospital is filled with patients with COVID-19 and 90% of the ICU is filled with COVID-19."
Taken from: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902...
The confounding factor here is that this includes patients hospitalized for reasons other than COVID. A patient that had a positive test might not be in the hospital because of COVID, but good luck to anyone trying to tease out that data.
https://amp.providencejournal.com/amp/16579156007
https://www.wpri.com/news/er-diversions-skyrocket-in-ri-foll...
It's embarrassing people keep pretending like every doctor in nurse in the USA who has said their hospitals have been overrun with death for over a year now and is the worst they ever have seen are just lying.
I'm guessing this is just some kind of coping mechanism because it's too terrible to comprehend and don't want it to be true, but it is fact.
Your following sentence refers to the U.S., but as for this one- this is exactly what's happening in Hong Kong right now:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/09/hong-kong-co...
What parallel world do you even live in?
- older person has some sort of non-covid related serious illness or injury
- can't get ICU bed in the "top" hospital in their area due to ICU overflows.
- Thus, patient sent to less renowned hospital where he eventually succumbs to disease or injury.
- Media blames Covid / unvaxxed for his death.
A couple points that they never mention:
- ICUs, by design, are usually at 90% full, so these scenarios happened before Covid due to just random odds of a few extra people needing ICU beds at some particular hospital in some particular week.
- If the media has to trot out stories of 70 year olds with chronic heart failure who may have been saved had they been able to get a bed in the nation's top cardiology department instead of merely some average hospital, then does it really represent a legitimate issue the rest of us should be concerned about?
It reminds me of how the media kept demanding we accept the narrative that Covid was super deadly to children, when by all accounts it's less dangerous than the flu, swimming pools, etc even BEFORE the CDC quietly revised their own numbers* downward. So they'd push some article about a 22 year old died of Covid. "Look - this virus will kill your kids toooooo."
And you'd actually read the article, and then realize it was some chronically sick kid who weighed 400 lbs and had suffered from severe respiratory and immune issues all their life. And you'd know - if this was the best example they could find to scare us - then you shouldn't really be scared.
* https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
And what's with the focus on Covid deaths - Covid sequelae are a thing and can significantly affect quality of life. My colleague is in his mid-20's, in good health - he had a mild case last Fall and still hasn't got his sense of smell back. When you can't smell methacrylic ester you know there's a problem.
…it’s a self created problem. All this testing caused people to loose their rational thinking.
"My Tinder date told me she has chlamydia, but she's asymptomatic. All good!"
And re general capacity: Someone I know spent a day waiting to be seen in an emergency room and then got sent home from the hospital with a (non-covid) lung infection with "you really should be kept under supervision, but we need the space for people who probably will die tonight if they are not here". He did make it (with help from family and some emergency intervention by a local doctor), but certainly had a higher risk than if he'd been kept in a normally-operating hospital.
https://knpr.org/npr/2022-01/ers-are-overwhelmed-omicron-con...
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/5...
https://www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/USA/2020/1119/O...
> Omicron absolutely crushed U.S. hospitals -- with some having to set up temporary emergency rooms in their parking structures.
ERs are overwhelmed as omicron continues to flood them with patients: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/13/1072902...
Why omicron is crushing hospitals — even though cases are often milder than delta: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/29/1075871...
> Many U.S. hospitals had to put off essential procedures and ran out of practically _everything_ (syringes, saline products, blood, etc.) during the last wave.
Americans get sicker as omicron stalls everything from heart surgeries to cancer care: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/02/04/1078029...
US hospitals struggle as Omicron Covid surge delays other treatments: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/22/us-hospitals-o...
I haven't seen anything considered "essential" being delayed, but anything that was not "immediately, medically" necessary in Texas was delayed on order of the Governor: https://www.texastribune.org/2020/07/09/texas-coronavirus-ho... My mother is a cancer patient and frequently had to delay (what I would consider essential) treatments by request of her provider.
Anecdotally, as someone married to an RN, supplies were absolutely running low throughout the pandemic. For the first year they were limited to 1 N95 mask per week, they frequently ran out of specific types/gauges of needles and had to make do with what was available, certain medications were hard to come by, etc. She doesn't work a COVID floor but still more often than not had a double patient load compared to pre-pandemic levels, both due to more patients and less staff. It was also incredibly common seeing people in neighborhood groups trying to find available beds for their family members during our surges, as most people were told there was a wait list expected to last at least 24 hours before something would be available.
I was referring specifically to Omicron, so both of your links aren't really what I was looking for—thanks anyways.
My main surprise was OP's assertion that medically necessary supplies such as blood had run out during the last surge, but so far this seems unsubstantiated. As you mentioned, I was aware masks have been in short supply at points throughout the pandemic, but blood and masks aren't quite equivalent.
https://www.redcross.org/about-us/news-and-events/press-rele...
But then… doesn’t this cover all government decisions and legislation?
If presented with this hypothetical situation in advance, perhaps we’d have preferred our governments did X, Y and Z differently.
But the ‘consent’ was given when our generation, or our parents’ or grandparents’, voted in the governments which passed the laws to allow for this.
With hindsight, I suspect many will not vote for the same governments again. But some will. Perhaps even the majority will.
In fact, during the pandemic, many governments who enacted what you call ‘experiments’ were re-elected in landslides.
In that case, I’d say that many people have given consent.
That said, I agree with your suggestion that we should try to figure out the cost/benefit of these measures. I think that’s a critical step over the next few years.
the governments had the media in their pockets from day 1 so of course the prevailing opinion would be they did well and would be reelected. just like Putin having great ratings in Russia.
I think we need to move to a more decentralised society where power is spread across the population and it sits as close as possible to the individual affected by the rules, the ultimate form being personal responsibility.
Are you suggesting that this story is inaccurate? Your claim is baffling in the face of… well, all the stories I’ve been reading the past two years.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/coronavirus/ct-nw-coronavirus...
My parents' friend had to delay a surgery after a heart attack in Minneapolis this winter because so many places were booked. I heard similar issues in New Hampshire. Nobody seemed to talk about it at that point, maybe because it's hard to quantify "strain" or exactly how many people died or otherwise suffered as a result.
Interesting take. My healthcare friends (doctors and nurses) literally 100% of them have either already bounced from the field, or have plans to immediately once they pay off medical debt.
Fully and entirely due to the way they were treated during covid by hospital administration and the collapse-like conditions they were forced to work through.
The bill coming due for our healthcare system hasn't even started installment payments yet.