Overwhelmed

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Liberals claim Minnesota hospitals are being overwhelmed with Covid patients.  I have questions about that.

This Minnesota Department of Health chart says we only have about 1,000 total ICU beds in the state.  What happened to the 3,000 Governor Walz said we had available on 72 hours’ notice, when he extended the lockdown last Spring?  That same chart shows we almost always have 1,000 ICU beds in use and presently only 366 of the ICU beds are being used by Covid patients.  Who’s using all the other ICU beds and if we need more ICU beds, why don’t we ramp up more ICU beds to handle all the patients?

Curiously, look at the map of Minnesota located below the chart.  It shows “Staffed ICU beds.”  Why “Staffed” and not just “Beds?”  Because “ICU bed” isn’t a physical thing.  The bed itself has no therapeutic properties.  “ICU bed” is a billing code that entitles the hospital to higher reimbursement because the patient in an ICU bed is being attended by staff qualified to monitor the patient using special equipment such as a heart monitor or ventilator.  That’s why we can set up ICU beds in tents or on a ship – it’s not about the beds, it’s about the staff and ancillary equipment. 

The chart says “Staffed” because you can’t bill it as an “ICU Bed” if you don’t have enough staff.  And why aren’t there enough staff?  What happened to all the caregivers?  Burnout?  Generous unemployment benefits? 

Ask it quietly: vaccine mandates?  But don’t expect an answer.  Liberals don’t want to talk about that.

Joe Doakes

When you have to be a lawyer to decipher the law, that’s annoying.

When you have to be a lawyer to decipher the news, that’s a bureaucracy run amok.

19 thoughts on “Overwhelmed

  1. Reposting this from an earlier thread:
    With the growing number of COVID-19 cases from the Omicron variant, and consistent with current understanding of the disease trajectory, CDC is releasing updated guidance for isolation and quarantine for healthcare workers, decreasing their isolation time after infection with COVID-19. Additionally, CDC is releasing an update to guidance for contingency and crisis management in the setting of significant healthcare worker shortages.
    https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2021/s1223-emergency-guidance-prepare-for-omicron.html

    Got that? As of December 23rd, if you work at a care facility full of the elderly and others with compromised immune systems, you can return to work seven days after testing positive for covid.
    The people stocking the shelves at Walmart still must self isolate for ten days.
    Oh, and:
    Healthcare workers who have received all recommended COVID-19 vaccine doses, including a booster, do not need to quarantine at home following high-risk exposures.
    People who are fully vaccinated & boosted are one of the most significant covid vectors.
    This is not science. It is flailing.

  2. Hey! Remember when medical staff were heroes, heroically working through 2020, the year of medical heroism, with no vaccines? Remember how the bodies of these heroes littered the hallways of hospitals the world over, exhausted, dead-tired from trying to survive the Kung flu, taking care of Kung flu patients, and coming up with Kung flu dance routines.

    The Kung flu dance routines were my favorite part of “hospitals are being overwhelmed with Covid patients”.

    And talking about littering… remember the 10s, 100s, 1000s of dead bodies in the streets and how the disposal of dead bodies overwhelmed the system? Good thing a freezer the size of a football field was acquired; that probably came in handy. And the trenches they had to dig to fill with the bodies… oh, wait, that was the dead bodies of mink from when the Social Democrats in Denmark killed the entire Danish mink industry – at that time one of the largest in the world – on the rumor that mink could act as a Kung flu reservoir.

    Yes, maybe mistakes were made… but this time, now, the liberals have learned from their mistakes, it’s all under control. Let’s do all the same things again but harder.

  3. I like to work at being compassionate, but I think there has to be some consequences for unvaccinated people who fill up the hospitals. Perhaps they should go to “special” emergency hospitals that reflect the necessity of rationing staff and space. All choices have consequences. So far, many of the consequences of the choice to be unvaccinated have fallen on everyone. It is time to let those who want to chart their own course actually see where that course them up to and including the necessary consequence of sub-optimal care when they get really sick.

  4. We do not have a crisis of the unvaccinated. That is a lie. We have a crisis of bad vaccine/quarantine policy leaving critical positions short-staffed in hospitals, nursing homes, police, firefighter, and even the military (an entire Navy ship sits quarantined in Gitmo because of Covid case counts).

    Blaming the unvaccinated to divert attention from bad vaccine/quarantine policy decisions that failed to defeat a virus is like blaming the kulaks for bad agricultural policy decisions that wrecked the latest Five Year Plan.

    Quietly shortening the quarantine periods (as the CDC did last week) and dropping vaccine mandates (as courts are considering) even as the Omicron variation rampages across the country reveals the true nature of the crisis is political, not medical. The ‘unvaccinated’ lie is just part of the cover-up.

  5. Vaccinated or not, JD, apparently in the UK “Covid patients occupy 6% of NHS hospital beds right now – pretty much the same levels since early September” (link.

  6. C.D.C. Shortens Covid Isolation Period for Health Care Workers
    The agency issued revised guidelines as Omicron cases climb and hospitals grapple with worker shortages that have left wards understaffed.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/23/health/cdc-covid-isolation-period-health-care-workers.html

    Some hospitals are only giving their workers 5 days off after a positive covid test.
    Since these workers tested positive for covid after being vaxxed and masked, I am beginning to doubt the competence of “public health officials.”
    Kind of makes you wonder how many billions of worker-days were lost to earlier, incorrect CDC guidance that required ten days of self-isolation after testing positive for covid.

  7. The nation’s hotspot is locked down Washington, D.C.:
    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html

    Since “science” tells us that there is a strong correlation between lockdowns and vax mandates, and DC has had had both for weeks, that means that the “science” is telling us that lockdowns and vax mandates INCREASE the spread of covid.
    You can’t argue with “science”!

  8. A study just came out that Omicron is almost indistinguishable from common cold. Imagine that! SCIENCE™!

  9. It takes a special sort of stupid to
    A) Decree that every person working at a hospital must take ten days off if they test positive for covid.
    B) Complain that hospitals are understaffed.

    The failure to foresee the absurd consequences of the decree likely would’ve been seen and sorted in the debate and deliberate part of the legislative process, but we are no longer a democracy, we don’t do debate and deliberate when it comes to important matters of public policy any more.

  10. MP, democracy is dead. Stick a fork in it. Dead and buried. This and Hutch thread could be joined on this account. When those in power are no longer held accountable, “journalists” are kissing feet and spreading propaganda (Hutch? referring by a pet name a person you are assigned to write about? Really?) while facts are buried and those who are trying to bring facts to light are intimidated and shut down, then we have made hard left turn into third world shithole banana republic territory.

    Woe is us. Leave your hellholes where your votes do not matter and you are persecuted, Move to states that still hold on to the Constitution and Bill of Rights and are resisting the woke. Shore up the numbers where votes DO indeed matter.

  11. My tiredness stems not from the prolonged measures taken to combat this pandemic, but from the unvaccinated that make it so necessary.

    Perhaps insurance companies and Medicare could simply not pay for hospitalization of patients who had the opportunity to get vaccinated, refused the vaccine and then developed COVID-19. “Freedom” means accepting the consequences of your actions.

  12. Illegal aliens admitted without vaccine get Covid and use hospital beds. No problem.

    Fully vaccinated people get breakthrough cases and use hospital beds. No problem.

    Unvaccinated people get Covid and use hospital beds. Big problem.

    This is not a medical analysis, it is a political discussion pitting favored groups against disfavored groups. And which group has the lowest vaccination rates? Blacks, whom Liberals now want to let die.

    Some things never change.

  13. FYI, depnding on location, the ration unvaxxed blacks to unvaxxed whites is 1.1:1.0 to 1.2:1.0.
    The most vaxxed ethnicity is Asian.
    Hospitals, in their rhetoric, anyhow, are dedicated to racist policies that favor black people over white people.
    So there is no way you can square this circle.

  14. Minnesota’s solution for rationing scarce healthcare services for Covid is:

    Here are the factors and their associated values:

    Being BIPOC (2 points)
    Age 65+ (2 points)
    BMI 35 kg/m2 and higher (2 points)
    Diabetes mellitus (2 points)
    Chronic kidney disease (3 points)
    Heart disease in patients ages 55+ (2 points)
    Chronic respiratory disease in patients ages 55+ (3 points)
    Hypertension in patients age 55+ (1 point)
    Immunocompromised (3 points)
    Pregnancy (4 points)

    see https://alphanews.org/minnesota-gives-non-white-patients-preferential-access-to-life-saving-covid-treatment/
    for more links

  15. Mister Bodine, The one item on your list stands out as a political award of favor is the “BIPOC” category.
    Every other category corresponds to a biological reality. “BIPOC” is not a biological reality, it is a political category.
    If you are a 30 year old Mexican American, in perfect health, fit and trim, you will be given a 2 point advantage over a non-hispanic white guy biologically indistinguishable from the Mexican American.
    Your last name is “Rivera,” you get two points.
    The same guy has changed his name to its Scots equivalent “Burns”, no 2 points.

  16. I have to wonder how much better the situation would be today if, instead of sending COVID patients into standard ICUs and then into nursing homes, we’d actually created separate, quarantined areas (say in old K-Mart and Gander Mountain stores) for those seriously ill with COVID.

  17. My tiredness stems not from the prolonged measures taken to combat this pandemic, but from the unvaccinated that make it so necessary.

    Elementary school children express the same tiredness when they stick their fingers in their ears and shout “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!”

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