I’m in the US.
My brother-in-law suffered a fall and went to a major regional medical center near our home. We dropped him off (all we could do) at 2 pm. He wasn’t taken out of the Emergency waiting room until 5 am. But what the heck, there obviously wasn’t any issue, nobody ahead of him and no COVID patients taking up capacity – you always make people with broken backs wait that long in a chair, right?
300+ new cases in our county yesterday. 300+ the day before. It IS a monumental clusterfuck in the US. Biden cannot get into office quickly enough. At least he’ll try to do something reasonable.
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UK seems to have a crisis every winter:
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Darwin Awards, anyone?
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The thing is, everyone knows why this happens.
Here’s the NHS budget in 2015-adjusted pounds:
And here’s the number of NHS beds (not the same X-axis, unfortunately):
In just 20 years, we’ve doubled the budget and almost halved the number of beds. Simplistically, then, it now costs 800,000 a year to keep an NHS bed in operation.
And the reason that’s happening is that there are now more managers (and an assortment of other human clagnuts) than there are beds. Or doctors, for that matter.
I realise number of beds is not necessarily the best measure of heath service success, but if there’s clearly an insufficient number, then that’s a problem. People have been complaining about this monumental level of incompetence for years, and every successive government sees it as their divine mission to make things worse.
Thus the average hospital is now so “under pressure” that they can’t cope with
2-3 additional people (on top of the existing two or three) who need an oxygen mask.
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They aren’t exaggerating. It went from 400 cases a day to 5000 cases a day with a 20% positivity rate it’s a massive clusterfuck. They thought they could manage it but it’s basically out of control.
It’s not just that there aren’t enough beds, having the medical staff available when they are needed most seems to be the limiting factor.
I hope my folks and my relatives are keeping their distance with those kind of numbers.
They say they can cope fine but the reality is they will have to have hard lockdown and close the schools…Again …To do that.
Describing the rise in hospitalisations and intensive care (ICU) patients – which have both doubled in a week – as “beyond any projections”, he said he was “extremely concerned” about the potential impact of the pandemic on the health service.
Even if people completely adhere to the current lockdown, there could be 1,300 Covid-19 patients in hospital and 300 in ICU by the end of the month, HSE chief clinical officer Dr Colm Henry warned. But Mr Reid stressed the health service is “not overwhelmed” and surge capacity is not yet being used.
In Cork city hospital 100 nurses are on leave related to covid, all non essential services cancelled.
There are apparently 86 hospitals in the Republic. So, much as in the UK, the average hospital is looking at perhaps 3 extra patients in the ICU, plus another 15 taking up bed-space.
Verily, the end of times is upon us!
Indeed. Nice to hear an official talking sense for once. #factsnotFUD
This is… not good, to put it lightly.
I just looked at the article, and the headline seems a bit misleading. It appears that the UK scientists are worried it might not work because of mutations in the spike protein, but there’s no evidence either way at the moment?
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The fact they are worried has me a bit worried though, especially since they’re confident it’ll work on the UK strain. We really need to stomp this thing out before it mutates too much, because we won’t be lucky every time.
Last I read, major hospitals were running out of oxygen because so many patients need to be hooked up…
In the old country contagion rate is 5% and we basically have 5 big hospitals plus one converted COVID exclusive care…filled up for three weeks. Lost 20 doctors this week. As in dead.
Then whoever orders in the supplies needs a jolly good spanking.
Oxygen is produced in enormous quantities industrially. There’s no need for any hospital to run out of it. Especially when you’ve only got a couple of thousand people needing it (UK figures).
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Dunno. Counting normal procedures plus the fact that Covid patients require higher concentrations of oxygen because their bodies simply can’t absorb it, well, it might be pushing resources.
We have over 1000 patients with COVID, more than half require breathing assistance of some kind.
Your ol’ country may well be different to my ol’ country 
According to official statistics, the average UK hospital ordinarily has two or three people on oxygen at any given time (ie., about 3000 in total). COVID-19 is adding another one or two.
If this is “overwhelming” the health system, then the UK should be reclassified as a third-world idiocracy forthwith. It’s a bloody disgrace considering the amount of money the NHS has available.
I just want to rant about the disinformation being spread about Covid. Dr. Drew already have a public apology for downplaying Covid gets it this week.
I thought it was good that he came out back in April as he could try to right some of the wrongs.
Then I was listening to the Adam Corolla Show recently and Dr. Drew was a guest. The episode aired just before Christmas, before he contacted the disease. Here’s an excerpt :
They’re (people in orange county) distancing and they’re wearing masks and they’re doing this. Oh, yeah. And and, you know, I just was before I heard you mention my name, I was reading an article about Lockdown’s. And every actual scientific studies suggest that Lockdown’s are making things worse, not just in terms of delayed medical care, in terms of the mental health consequences, but all the transmission at a rate of about five to one now is occurring in the homes. And articles came out across the weekend that showed asymptomatic spread is essentially a non phenomenon.
And when you send people so you don’t spread it if you don’t have symptoms, correct? There may be
We were we so we relied heavily, rely heavily on worst case scenarios.
So it’s now starting to appear that lockdown’s don’t have an effect. And the way you would know it is Atlanta sorry, Georgia and Texas and Florida and a lot of places didn’t lock down. And California locked down pretty hard. And now we’re having this huge spike and those other places aren’t. "
TLDR they try to claim lockdowns don’t work and that asymptomatic people don’t spread covid-19.
and this is one the the most popular podcasts in the US
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The truth would seem to lie somewhere between these two extremes. At least until the middle of last week hospitals in the Republic were offering to take patients from Northern Ireland where the hospitals were truly unable to cope, queues of ambulances outside became semi-permanent treatment rooms.
I really want to return to Taiwan. This is devastating to my side business. The stress of exams is just piling on this week. I had hope for 2021, but it looks like it’s going to get worse before it gets better.
I was fine and understanding of the initial lockdowns. But I think I’ve been in some sort of lock down, self isolation, mandated quartine for like 7-8 months in total now from may of 2020. At some point, the numbers don’t mean anything anymore. The lockdowns have messed up my life way more than the virus. It’s like that for many people.
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I’m truly sorry. I’m sorry for you, for my parents (“life here is very miserable, and it’s not getting any better, We’d just like to see people, do things …”), and for all the thousands of other people whose livelihoods have been destroyed, the children whose education is being hampered, the mental illness that is now being endured by so many.
A hundred years from now, historians will not be talking about covid-19 as an example of a deadly pandemic on par with the Spanish flu. They will be talking about it as an example of how easy it is to induce a state of collective mass hysteria. Given that this is the case, how long will the present hysteria continue?
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British covid is the best covid.
Take that eu! British are back on top creating the best variant of covid. They said the brits couldn’t export anything, take that. The tide is finally turning. This just shows brexit was the right path to take their country back. Move over China. British covid is number 1.
https://www.who.int/csr/don/21-december-2020-sars-cov2-variant-united-kingdom/en/
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