The current rage on Facebook among the local parents appears to be:
“The data is misleading and is intentionally designed to increase FEAR. The goverment is reporting data based on REPORTED date, rather than ACTUAL incident date. If you look at the date of ACTUAL hospitalizations and deaths, you’ll see that they are DECLINING, while the government tells us they are INCREASING. DO NOT BE FOOLED BY THEIR LIES.”
There was a parent on Facebook that was making this argument, but struck me as someone who as potentially reasonable. So last night after the kids went to bed, I made the mistake of writing a long email explaining why incident-date reporting will bias trends downwards, and artificially make things look better than they appear. For the state of Ohio, I have both reported date cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as of 7/30/2020 and assigned date cases, hospitalizations, and deaths (i.e., the date when the event was determined to have happened, rather than when it was reported). I prepared an analysis to show how closely they track. This is what the hospitalization data looks like, but the patterns for deaths and cases looks similar:
The trends in reported-date data (orange) very closely mirror the trends in incident-date data, which indicates that using reported-date data as a proxy for the conceptually better incident-date data is almost certainly fine. That is, up until the last few weeks when the two lines sharply diverge. That’s because we can’t get an accurate incident-date count (the blue line) for recent days until all of that data is collected and backfilled, which can take weeks. So the best indication of current trends is the orange line, which is based on report-date data. If you try to interpret recent incident-date data, you’ll come to the mistaken conclusion that hospital admissions are decreasing. But that’s just an artifact of the missing data for recent days/weeks. The report date data is less conceptually pure, but it’s a far better indication of the current trajectory, and hospital admissions are very clearly increasing.
I tried to be thorough and polite to back up the two points I wanted to make:
Current trends are not favorable; the numbers you’re looking at are mechanically biased downward and give misleading impressions.
Government is not lying to you with the goal of generating fear. It’s presenting the best data upon which to make current decisions.
I am competely demoralized because I got a huge email response back saying of course she understands all that, but hospital cases and deaths are still declining and she knows that the government is presenting misleading data.
It is just so fucking hard to combat misinformation.
I’m sympathetic. The mental health of the people doing these jobs is being damaged. Burnout is a serious concern. I saw very few nurses over 40 working in the ICU. Especially now it’s understandable to feel unappreciated, but isn’t it true that nursing is consistently among the most respected professions? I’m actually hopeful more young people will be attracted to nursing and health care careers as it becomes clearer just how important and meaningful these jobs are.
Imagine wanting to join the nursing profession during a plague, with 30% of the country or so actively trying to kill you, with a government that will not provide you with PPE. You are a literal saint if so. I take no pride in saying it couldn’t be me.
I’m in a couple of the women’s poker FB groups and the ones who have traveled to Vegas to play the online events are also playing some live sessions.
These three are better socially-distanced than any of the tables I’ve seen posted by people doing live TRs, so on a relative scale, I’d say safer than any of the poker rooms that are open now.
On an absolute scale, I’d never ever play live right now so no, it doesn’t look safe to me. I keep getting invited to what is no doubt an incredibly soft home game, but it’s run by a deplorable retired cop so I know they aren’t wearing masks or doing ANY distancing…so I have to keep turning it down.
Both of my sisters are nurses. For them, the profession made them both tough as nails. And they both have a little of that “fuck you, if you tell me its hard I’ll show you I can do it, you big baby” attitude.
They’ll know what I think about it. That’s as far as it would go obviously. If I have a child who really really really wants to be a teacher or something I’m sure it’ll overcome any objections I might have.
EDIT: And yeah I’m not perfect. I’m also not even a parent yet, so chill lol. Might not even happen.
I’m sure that attitude got ingrained into them because the job was such a cakewalk.
People with that level of work related trauma should make more than the stock standard bachelors degree gig. Their on the job injury rates are off the charts too and the culture is absolutely oriented around working hurt and not reporting.
I get that a lot of you think of being a nurse as a pretty good job, but I’m living with the downsides of the occupation every day. Literally the only other human being I have person to person contact with is a nurse lol. I feel like I might be as close to it as you can get without being a nurse and mine isn’t even working a COVID wing right now.
There’s a crisis on and we’re not compensating the front line troops close to fairly… in this country it was ever thus. It’s not an accident that my great great grand fathers best war story from the Union Army (He was a in an Engineering regiment attached to Sherman’s army) was according to family lore being a leader in a strike over not being paid in some ever changing number of weeks.
There are lots of jobs that pay bachelors degree money without one if you’re willing to break yourself physically/emotionally/spiritually for it. These jobs are what we should really be comparing nursing to. It’s not particularly flattering and the big difference between them is that men have historically dominated those other jobs. Nursing pays worse and requires more training than most of them.
If we’re going with anecdotes, most of my friends are nurses on the night shift. They are compensated very well and seem to enjoy what they do. For example - one of my newly minted nurse friends is pulling down nearly what I make as a software dev at a fairly large company. He is just a RN, which does not require a bachelor’s (although I hear there’s a big push to require bachelor’s in nursing at hospitals).
What I think is YMMV depending on what hospital you work for.
From what I gather the nursing shortage is mostly due to a lack of schooling resources and not a lack of bodies/talent - I know from my friends that these programs are extremely hard to get into and have very high standards for not getting booted. There’s plenty of talent and demand for the profession, just not a good way of churning out enough nurses that are required.
It’s a little the opposite of the software talent problem. There’s plenty of labor out there but very little of it is talented and the schooling mostly sucks ass. I’d rather be a nurse, TBH.
I think it’s interesting the path many millennials have been forced to take - if you want to have a good career out of school, nursing is what everyone is going for. If you’re really smart, learning to code and getting a BS in computer science is the way to go. Outside those two fields - you’re pretty much fucked as a millennial/Gen Z out of school.
And that red and purple states suuuuucccckkkk, and especially abuse “women-orientated” professions the way BoredSocial is saying. My wife is a teacher in a blue state, is paid fairly for the work she does and couldn’t be happier.
My sister says she would never, ever want her daughter be a teacher based on stories she hears from friends and how much they make… no surprise, she lives in Georgia.
I’m really interested in these jobs you say that exist with zero to bachelor’s degree education, where the success stories can make 80k+ with minimal hassle.
I get that if you have self-motivation and sales skills, then you can do enough volume to carve out a better-than-middle-class living… in real estate, mortgages, financial planning, or whatever.
Or you could go to coding boot camp, catch on with a hot start-up, and take it to the moon.
I’m just saying I know a ton of college grads working shit office jobs that hate what they do, and are eminently replaceable, for all the OTHER bachelor’s college grads entering the work force. And they have a lot less security or flexibility than I do in health care.
