What I Believe About Our Response to the Epidemic

We don’t have COVID wards? We just mix 'em in with everybody else? I didn’t realize that.

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No, we’re not treating patients in wards period. Mostly they are in individual/double rooms under quarantine or the sever cases are in ICU’s under quarantine.

less.

wouldn’t a hospital put all those individual/double room on the same floor, to you know keep them away from the other sick people.

Most big hospitals have specific wings dedicated to infectious disease where they can control transmission risks with segregated ventilation etc.

We haven’t done the large group ward thing in the US for about fifty or sixty years though with a few emergency exceptions mostly for trauma cases.

We haven’t done big open wards for infectious diseases since probably the fifties with the last big polio outbreak where you might have 20-50 people in iron lung wards all together. By that point in treatment most or all were no longer a risk for transmitting it anyhow, they were in recovery.

You want to know why I don’t?

I can remember being told that closing businesses and all was necessary because hospitals could be overrun like they were in Italy. We couldn’t be in a situation where people would be sent home to die because there weren’t enough ICU beds or respirators.
It seem like the talk now is more like we can’t open up because we don’t want one person to die. A criteria we never used for closing highways or for the flu.
When did this switch from not having hospitals overrun to we can’t allow anyone to die? Or am I reading it wrong?

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We’ll never even be able to calculate all of the unnecessary deaths that have resulted from the lock downs and ER’s/Hospitals basically shutting down for everything other than CCPV and Trauma cases.

How many will die of cancer because they couldn’t get in and get diagnosed early? How many because they couldn’t get surgery? How many excess deaths due to common ailments like heart disease, diabetes etc that couldn’t get treated?

The panic induced by the media is responsible for the overreaction and the deaths that resulted from it.

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It’s really messed up I frequent reddit some and the subreddit /coronavirus is filled with people who are basically saying stay in until a vaccine arrives. If you post something to the contrary of that they downvote the hell out of it.

And you are right hospitals are empty and in the meantime while congress just pushed a stimulus bill which called for a major increase in H1-B visas for medical positions (Basically will drive down wages like they have been doing in I.T. for years) medical staff are being laid of by the thousands because they are not needed as the hospitals lay empty.

In my lifetime this is turning out to be the worst handled crisis I have seen the U.S. government handle while the media has been stoking the :fire: with 24/7 fear coverage to make a large percentage of the population of the U.S. so afraid to go outside they would choose economic ruin over what probably is under a 1% chance of death.

They all need to be voted out. I am reading some forecasts that many universities will cease to exist after this as people will be to afraid to go to school unless there is a vaccine and they will have to close because the universities will fold.

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And we should give credit to news agencies like Fox where they’ve had presenters trying to focus on reasons for hope and who have been trying to oppose with rational analysis the irrational panic-peddling of most MSM

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I would argue that it is the Trump hating left that doesn’t care.

The left ignores the fact that if we stay down very long folks will be losing their homes and even starving if it lasts long enough.

A “cure” much worse than the disease.

Do leftists care? Nope. They intend to keep the states down as long as possible.

That’s not caring to the Max.

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Great point. Those numbers have to be high.

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I do wanna know.

Then click on the link in his post./ :wink:

I just showed you.

Yes, that is what we do. All COVID patients go to wards and floors specifically for and only for COVID patients to lower the risk to other patients. At our hospital we emptied out multiple floors strictly for COVID patients. Once we started a decline, floors were closed, sterilized and brought back to the general population of patients.

Whether that constitutes a “COVID ward” is semantics.

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Looking back, would it have been better to designate hospitals instead of wards for COVID?

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Almost certainly. We’ll never be able to quantify the damage that’s been done by shutting down so much of the rest of the medical system for so long.

How many unnecessary deaths from things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes etc are gong to result from people not getting in for early detection/treatment?

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As long as that Hospital wasn’t mine I would be all for it. I hated that whole mess, it was insanely stressful. But would that targeted hospital hold up? Imagine what a nightmare that place would be. There would be folks jumping off the roof there.

Spreading it out a bit, I think, helped. But it did suck.

One interesting aspect to this is that, for the past 20 years, hospitals have really compartmentalized care. There is not just a hospital, there is also a surgical center, a heart center, a cancer center.

That may have been a blessing in disguise, segregating the care the way we have. Our cancer center is not even attached to the main hospital, our surgical center is 4 miles away. So patients should still feel safe going there. Our heart center is within the hospital though, so we did take a bit of a hit. Coming back pretty strongly now, though.

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