Oof but yeah. My wife and I are just trying to grind out this last 6-7 weeks until she probably gets vaxxed and our risk goes to actually zero from very considerable. This country has been putting things off since the Boomers took power back in the early 80’s, and now the bills have started coming due. We can keep denying reality and experience the entire 12 plagues, or we can wake up and do the right thing for at least a few consecutive years.
The fact that this is even a hard question is a massive indictment of the entire culture honestly. I worry that if we don’t learn from Germany’s example we’re going to experience Germany’s example. This sense of impunity our leaders carry themselves around with has to go. We need to grow the fuck up. Someone tell the Boomers Peter Pan was just a story and that we’re all actually adults with responsibilities. To more than just ourselves is what you say when they start talking about all of the things they think are more important than the future of the whole human race.
When the eventual documentaries get made about Covid people like Whitmer will be there heros and the MAGA morons will be the villains. Also fuck the WSJ.
I subscribed for their business journalism, which is legitimately good. Now its impossible to cancel as they won’t let you do it online and its an endless wait on hold when you call. Before Murdoch bought it the opinion page was right-wing but fairly rational. Now they’re shamelessly all-iin on Trumpism, disgraceful.
The only question in my mind is whether we have enough tests to count that high. You said it yourself 3.5-3K is 3-4 weeks away. The end of December is six weeks away, and we’ve got a super spreader that will be just in time to start causing deaths around Christmas.
Counting deaths will likely be more accurate than cases as we move forward. I realize some who die at home will be missed and red states will likely shenanigan it some as they have been all along.
That’s right. Now just keep your ass inside like a good boy and we won’t have any more lockdowns. Don’t even look out that window. The outdoors doesn’t exist for the next 6 days.
I think there will be a significant undercount of deaths because some states will try not to count unconfirmed likely covid deaths for obvious reasons.
But it should become somewhat obvious to us here on UP when we hit that point, because it’s extremely unlikely we’d hit an R0 = 1 and crank out consistent numbers of cases and deaths for a few weeks.
Today has the most deaths since May 7th to put it in perspective. I fully expect the US to break the all time high for deaths right around the end of the month.
At this point we just need to ramp tests so that we can identify as many as possible of the 40-100 million cases before spring so that vaccines can be most effectively deployed.
According to the AHA website we have roughly 100,000 ICU beds nationwide. That includes some that may not be suitable for Covid like neonatal ICU beds. The total number of beds in the US hospital system is 924,000 but many of those will lack equipment and trained staff to handle critically ill Covid patients.
In short we have to be getting very very close to the breaking point especially when you factor in some ICU beds will be needed for the normal winter surge of other stuff.
Source is here:
In sad as hell front lines news one of my wife’s friends and coworker’s dad who was in his 60s and relatively healthy just died today at my wife’s hospital from Covid. The exact text I got from her after telling me that was:
“I AM NOT FUCKING OK”
Just totally horrible and chilling. I am very fearful for her mental health and also for the inevitable damage this will do to our marriage as there is no way I can really comprehend what she is going through. The whole thing is fucking awful.
Give me an oxygen hookup and some suction, and I can make it an ICU bed. My main hospital went from 12 ICU beds to 50. We converted post and pre op areas and the endoscopy suite. It can be done.
The limiting factor will be nurses. Doctors can cover tons of patients at once. Doctors generally make plans, nurses/resp techs do the vast majority of implementation of those plans and report when there’s problems. Unfortunately that doesn’t scale well. ICU nurses generally max out at 2 patients per nurse. It should be 1 if they’re sick. Going to 3-4 will result in misses and deaths.
When we were riding the peak people died repeatedly because the nurses were overwhelmed. Drips run out, things get missed until too late, etc. That’s not a dig on my nurses at all, god knows I love those people to death forever. It was just too much.
I’m really sorry about your wife’s friend’s dad. Sending well wishes to you guys. Hang in there a few more months and we’ll hopefully be actually turning the corner.
