My brother-in-law is suffering in pain 24-7 from an injury that could be treated with surgery, but that is now forbidden. I think it is pretty likely that other people are suffering and even dying because they are denied medical care. This is because health care is being rationed, reserved for Covid patients who
a) are not showing up in hospitals in the expected numbers; and
b) might not be treatable if they did show up
I am surprised there is not more outrage about this.
I suspect that it is also because the doctors are concerned about giving covid to patients like your brother in law. An orderly who was contagious for two weeks before showing symptoms, as is common, could infect hundreds of vulnerable patients.
My friend was laid off from her nurse job because they don’t have PPE to protect themselves from COVID, and thus couldn’t see any patients. Even if the government allowed this (she didn’t mention anything about any government restriction), there would still be the problem of their being unable to treat anyone safely.
The outrage is coming. Yesterday my son-in-law, who is a critical care doc treating Covid-19 patients at the University of Virginia hospital, had his pay cut by 20%. The announcement that UVA put out said “as a result of earlier actions needed to respond to COVID-19, hundreds of inpatient beds have been regularly unoccupied, surgeries have declined by 70%, and clinic visits have been reduced by 90%. The result has been a fall in revenue from clinical care and related services that is producing a deficit of $85 million a month.”
I’m also surprised there’s so little outrage about the redistribution from young to old of this virus. Young people are sacrificing a lot, not to save themselves but to save seniors. Seniors are of course dying, but most of them are retired and mostly immune to the economic damage. Lockdowns are all cons and no pros for young people; lockdowns are all pros and no cons for seniors. (Note that we are doing lockdowns)
The generation that spent a year shouting “Ok Boomer” in response to trivial nonsense has been so silent about the fact that we are once again doing the thing that benefits Boomers at the expense of everyone else. Not that anyone wants people to die. But no one is even asking whether there’s a limit to how much a poor young family should have to spend to save an unhealthy 80 year old.
Given the implicit redistribution from young to old, a more just policy might be a massive wealth tax on people over 65 to redistribute to young people displaced by lockdowns. But such policies will never be discussed.
I find rather odd that we are now discussing the conceptual splitting of society along age range, we never did that before, why start no?. As a Brit (and the same would be true of other nationalities) there was a massive wealth transfer to the old at the start of state pensions (to which the recipients hadn’t contributed). It was seen as the mark of civilisation, not as robbery.
Further. As each generation benefits from all the compounded progress of all generations before, there is generally a downwards wealth transfer (our children are wealthy than us). Any current wrinkles in that (house prices) are a blip, the basic pattern is ongoing.
The more I think about Josh’s point, the more offensive I find it. Do you care if your parents/ grandparents die from this?
Question- do the grandparents care if their children and grandchildren have shortened lives due to the economic calamity we are now in the process of actively abetting?
I realize I am a bad person for saying this but most of the old people deaths are not random deaths that strike everyone equally. They are people who already have health problems, problems that in a different context, health authorities would tell us are “preventable”.
Now, it is easy to gain weight and hard to lose it. It is easy to get out of the habit of moving and hard to get exercise again. It is easy to do a lot of unhealthy things in an affluent society. But still, I can’t feel as bad for the death toll of this virus as I would be if it primarily took healthy 40-year-olds.
On the other hand, my mother took such good care of herself that when she got dementia at a very ripe old age, she wanted to die, but her body wouldn’t let her.
For policy makers it is easier to see the deaths attributable to COVID-19. It is harder to track the root cause of every other death. So a policy decision which reduces deaths from COVID is easy to take.
A policy decision which may increase deaths from COVID but decreases deaths/pain/suffering from innumerable causes is unpalatable because it doesn’t “tweet” well.
I’m in a similar but less severe situation. I tried to make an appointment with a podiatrist because of a minor foot problem and was told they can only accept emergency appointments until at least June 1, so my foot remains untreated, leaving me in some mild pain when I walk. It’s more of an inconvenience than anything, but I can imagine there are plenty of people with more severe conditions who are suffering a lot more than me.
There are a lot of “excess mortality” charts that are supposed indicate that we are undercounting Covid deaths.
We are guaranteed to be undercounting death due to any cause, especially something syndromic like Covid.
Those who are advocating excess mortality charts as a “more accurate” representation of covid’s severity owe it to the community to at least attempt to disaggregate deaths caused by the shutdown.
But, few seem to even discuss whether these excess deaths are due to the shutdowns, especially the shutdown of healthcare.
Am I missing something?
You are missing the goals of journalists and politicians, which include, in no small measure, signaling their own importance.
Accomplishing this requires vastly simplifying the choice, basically to “lockdown or not?”
Some major cancer centers have stopped accepting new patients for the time being to either protect current patients from the virus or contribute to covid-related healthcare, and I imagine other potentially fatal illnesses for which treatment is time sensitive are also going undiagnosed and untreated in greater numbers, so some people will die in the next year because of the absence of care today. Not sure it’ll be enough to cancel out the pulling forward of deaths, but I’m not certain it’ll be negligible either.
In Contra Costa county there are approximately 1,700 hospital beds. There are at present exactly 37 of those beds occupied by Covid-19 patients. Hundreds are empty.
But, a certain health network will not / cannot operate on my friend with a very painful herniated disk. They cancelled all ‘elective’ surgeries due to govt edict promulgated by Governor Nuisance.
Based on the response I’ve seen to articles stating that the lockdowns may be overdone, or even downright useless in many places, I think we’re seeing a lot of people having bought in to lockdowns and unable to change their minds.
Basically, they’ve expended a great deal on lockdowns — in terms of time, energy, and resources in the form of opportunity costs, and are emotionally incapable of regarding these as sunk costs. So they double down on the absolute necessity of locking down even in the face of data that shows we can start opening up.
My unfortunate cousin’s struggle with stage four breast cancer just got harder, the doctors suspended her experimental chemotherapy because it suppresses the immune system during a pandemic. Her rather desperate condition only worsens and she has made noises about welcoming the virus compared to her present plight. Please pray for her if your heart so allows.
It’s not that we shouldn’t protect the vulnerable. It’s about the correct government action. All-Star Taiwan in this pandemic has open schools and businesses AND a low infection rate. We could be like them but our powers that be chose otherwise.
I am disgusted every day at work (the few days a week I do work) that my patients are suffering because of CCP virus panic. Sorry, Sweden was right and life goes on.