We're about to find out one way or the other in the US. Hospitals are full, ERs are full, ICUs are full and it is likely going to stay that way all fall/winter. This has two consequences: 1) There are no beds and/or staff for people coming in with heart attacks or from car crashes or other solvable issues. 2) Fatigue is building on hospital healthcare workers. They are being berated by family members of dying un-vaccinated persons. They are at a breaking point.I think we will see a complete meltdown of our hospital system. There is going to be a flood of healthcare quitting. I personally expect 20% to walk away over the next 6 months.
Is every hospital getting overwhelmed though? I keep seeing reports of staff getting fired or quitting because of vaccine requirement. Maybe I'm getting fake news?
If you live in a low vaccination rate state in the US, you'll probably experience a severe shortage of medical care for the next few months, especially if you need to go to a hospital. My wife is a nurse in an ICU that is at 100% capacity (the majority of which are unvaccinated COVID patients, and a few vaccinated COVID patients too).
I imagine in many other countries there will be massive shortages of medical care as delta burns through earth's population.
This is probably the worst shortage we'll experience as part of the pandemic, because staffed hospital bed shortages means people will die of conditions they normally wouldn't die from.
Dig deeper on this. At least in the US, a big part of "full hospitals" isn't sick people, but a lack of staff due to vaccination requirements and people quitting.
I have a friend in southern Ohio who is an ICU doc. They’ve been dealing with +140% occupancy for the last few weeks. Staff shortages in their hospital are due to people leaving the field entirely (either worn out, tired of patient abuse, or actually dead). Vaccine mandates had almost zero impact.
Most of the hospitals near me are near capacity for ICU beds due to people refusing a free vaccination.
If I have a heart attack or car accident tomorrow, I’m at serious risk of not getting a bed and treatment.
If the anti-vac morons weren’t taking up so much space at the hospitals, I’d agree. But with numbers the way they are, “return to normal” is a pipe dream.
Hospital system collapse is the most pessimistic outcome. Hospitals have spent the past two years not bulking up their personnel and infrastructure, so I don't think even the medical industry earnestly considers that a serious threat. The most realistic worse case scenario is the unvaccinated get triaged out of the hospital system.
Hard to say right now. Hospitals in my state have just activated emergency protocols, because our surge is already exceeding Winter-2020 levels. This means that 20% of surgeries are going to be cancelled, and other such care is going to be officially rationed off. (BTW: We're at 90% adults vaccinated, but "70% to 80%" of the hospitalizations are unvaccinated individuals).
EDIT: To be clear: individual hospitals declare emergencies. Its not a state-wide declaration. Hospitals have begun to declare emergencies and activate hospital-specific rationing.
Omicron has been a bitch so far. It seems like it is causing hospitalizations in the unvaccinated population, maybe not at the same "rate" as Delta, but in high enough numbers that we're going to run out of hospital beds in my area.
-------
Elsewhere in the country... Florida's 300% rise in cases this past week has demonstrated that natural-immunity from Alpha/Delta was completely worthless vs Omicron.
Florida is well on its way to having a worse surge than it ever had before. It doesn't seem like we can natural-immunity our ways out of this.
See this is exactly what they said last time, they said hospitals were being overwhelmed then it turned out later that the emergency wards had been empty the whole time.
Anyway, I was suspicious so I looked up some of the hospitals you mention. It turns out they are actually short of staff not beds... because they fired them all for not taking the vaccine.
The media is in full spin trying to cover up the reason why hospital workers are leaving, claiming it is because they are exhausted, and ignoring the fact they were fired.
Also, chances are we’re going to exit this pandemic (whenever that happens) with a severely reduced medical system. We’re burning through medical personnel at an unsustainable rate, and we’re all going to suffer a diminished level of care until replacements can be retrained and hired.
Given that there are many nurses protesting vaccine mandates, it could be that putting such mandates in place will lead to a lot of them quitting, which could make the hospital system less "intact" and resilient.
Hospitals fill up every winter from respiratory viruses. The healthcare system is designed to fill up. There's no point having expensive rooms, machines, and staff sitting idle. Planners forecast seasonal requirements and build healthcare around the maximum.
We're probably going to see increased demands on hospitals simply due to the larger numbers of old people.
For example, 2009 Swine Flu (remember that?) is about as deadly as 2020 COVID. But now in eg. the USA, there are 2.9m 80-84 year old men (elderly men are in the prime risk category for COVID deaths), compared to 2.3m in 2009:
These demographic trends were exacerbated by weak flu seasons in 2018 and 2019.
Crises always bring light to pre-existing failures in systems. COVID is simply exposing Western societies as aged, overweight, and Vitamin-D deficient.
I am not sure about the insignificance of 5%. In Germany, hospitals loose personnell, because after 3 big waves people simply can't cope with the stress any more. Every health system in countries which play fast and loose this winter will have a really bad time.
Please get vaccinated, if not for your sake for others needing to use emergency services. I waited 4 hours in a good deal of pain in an ER waiting room to be stationed to an overflow bed in the hall because of unvaccinated covid cases filling up the rooms. Being next to the nurses' station I got to hear multiple ambulances and helicopters be redirected to farther away hospitals due to lack of room while doctors and nurses constantly rushed between rooms with confused oxygen deprived patients trying to get out of their beds and take their oxygen masks off while they waited for spots in the ICU to open up.
Talking to the nurses the vast majority of hospitalized cases are unvaccinated and looking it up 40% of the state is unvaccinated but they represented 98% of the covid hospitalizations that were filling up over 1/3 of the beds that night. Exactly 0 beds across the entire state were taken due to being vaccinated.
Thankfully 4 hours of pain is something that is easy to get over and I was able to get treated before it caused life threatening problems, some of the people that were redirected won't be able to say the same.
From what I understand, hospitals in certain areas are running out of capacity as that graph indicates with certain states quite a bit more purple than others. But I would put unvaccinated people at the back of the line, even behind elective procedures and hope hospital management does whatever it takes to make sure others are prioritized.
Not surprising. I was wondering when the Christmas surge was going to hit our medical system. Only problem is that with a full ER, folks that could have survived with minimal care end up dying or deteriorating because all the beds are full and because the staff is overworked.
I live in South Carolina, where the pandemic is especially bad now, and where vaccine uptake has been low. A friend told me that ambulances were being turned away at the front door of a local hospital.
It is true that there are many possible factors for this, that planning at that hospital might have been questionable and/or very profit-oriented. Also, I've read that a lot of medical staff have gotten fed up with the situation, and in some cases quit their jobs.
But matter the underlying causes, it's a scary picture.
All the people who hate the masks and hate the vaccines never really have any answer to this, what happens when the hospitals fill to capacity or the staff give up from exhaustion.
I don't know the situation in the US, but here in the UK, the only reason there is a strain on hospitals is not because of high hospital admissions, they aren't particularly high. It is because of mandatory self-quarantine requirement for hospital staff who test positive, which result in staff shortage. We wouldn't do that with a cold, and this variant, at least to the vaccinated, is little more than a cold.
Yet, healthcare systems are currently rushing to axe many thousands of unvaccinated healthcare workers. Don’t you think it sends mixed messages to be claiming that there’s such a dire shortage of ICU capacity on one hand, but to be letting so many fully capable healthcare workers go? (many of whom have already been exposed to Covid and have natural immunity anyway)
reply