I think I have talked about my father-in-law in this thread before. He is in his mid-60s was diagnosed with cancer last year, got chemotherapy and they found metastases in his lungs a few weeks ago.
He is rapidly detiorating to an extent that he will require hospitalization in a few days if not today. The problem is that we are afraid that with visits being banned and the triaging-situation in Italy, my wife believes he will just die in a hall somewhere without adequate care, so she and my mother in law have decided to not call an ambulance. They are trying to get a place in a hospice for him and for my mother-in-law to have a live-in place there, but if the place says they won’t take him because they are not equipped to deal with his resiratory issues, we are fucked.
Even right now it is hard to see him suffer. I don’t know how my wife, her mum and the kids will be able to handle this. The guy has some deplorable-adjacent views, but all-in-all he is a decent guy who probalby brought this upon himself by smoking muliple packs a day for the last 50+ years. Still a horrible situation.
Immunocompromised employees would likely appreciate you taking their increased risk into consideration. Good luck handling this all, I don’t envy that position.
Let me take the arguments on their merits. The stated aim has been to achieve “herd immunity” in order to manage the outbreak and prevent a catastrophic “second wave” next winter – even if Matt Hancock has tried to put that particular genie back in the bottle this weekend. A large proportion of the population is at lower risk of developing severe disease: roughly speaking anyone up to the age of 40. So the reasoning goes that even though in a perfect world we’d not want anyone to take the risk of infection, generating immunity in younger people is a way of protecting the population as a whole.
We talk about vaccines generating herd immunity, so why is this different? Because this is not a vaccine. This is an actual pandemic that will make a very large number of people sick, and some of them will die.
(except for the precedent which will surely fuck us all)
BUT AT LEAST IT FEELS GOOD NOW
I think I understand Trump supporters better now. They know they’re fucked either way. But at least Trump let them spike it in their enemies’ faces. Although I doubt they realized how much worse fucked they were going to be.
I’m sorry man, truly I am. If he has no chance to recover find a doc who will prescribe meds to keep him comfortable at home. Literally the worst things I see in the hospital are people dying alone, and the most heart warming is a whole family surrounding their loved one as s/he passes. I wouldn’t let my grand parent go to a hospital to die right now. No fucking way that would happen.
This is probably California noting they have way more dead than US CV-19 team accounted for… already!
65+yr olds will occupy all the respirators the 40-64yrs old need.
Trump talks about buying more respirators but you’ll need to manufacture them in the US (no country is selling for OBV reasons) and you needed to start 2 weeks ago. Should have the tests sorted by the end of the week. That website should be up in a few days. zzz. GL
They have already talked to the doctor and he says that medication won’t really be any help, because his respiratory issues can’t really be treated with medication - even on a purely palliative basis. That was last week. He has really detiriorated since then. My wife is going to call the doctor again tomorrow and see what she says. At least my wife is a trained nurse, so she knows what questions to ask.
He has some in-home care with a hospice network. Unfortunately he got a letter yesterday saying that they can’t garantuee that they will be able to provide the service if curfews are imposed or if too many of their workers have to quarantine (which does make sense, but still sucks.)
I have no idea how it works in Germany but hospice was a godsend for my stepdad. I was in the room when my stepdad confirmed with the hospice worker that he just wanted to go to sleep forever. She was able to arrange basically an OD of pain meds that immediately put him unconscious and kept him comfortable for a day or so that it took until he stopped breathing. Without hospice that could have been a much worse situation and dragged out much longer.
Apparently 1/3rd of Japan’s population was wiped by a smallpox virus initially contracted by a fisherman in Korea. So I suppose it’s not impossible that genes somewhere in the chain of infected → death (e.g., viral pneumonia) might make that endpoint less likely. It’s a cool theory for how the disease was controlled, but as is often the case, the actual answer is based on sound science and is far less interesting:
One manifestation of the pandemic’s great impact was that by August of 737, a tax exemption had been extended to all of Japan.
I think he is not quite there yet, but that seems to be the thing we hope will be possible in a week or two. We will have to fade a total breakdown of health services until then.
~60m populations, advanced health services but USA#1 goona do better??
EU - way more testing, reliable numbers
To date, an estimated 162,687 people have been infected worldwide with just under half of them in China (81,003 cases). An estimated 6,065 people have died, 3,085 of them in China.
