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A Physician Ramble on Covid
I have a visceral distrust of government mandates, probably like most people on Ricochet. In addition, I think Fauci’s early lying to a free people that masks don’t work in order to preserve them for healthcare workers was abominable and sowed seeds of distrust in public health that are bearing fruit today. That being said, derided, discouraged, hated, or mandated, masks work to decrease the spread of COVID.
I am a doctor. My wife is a doctor. We have seen countless COVID-positive patients. Before the vaccines were available, we were protected by nothing but masks and we did not get COVID. Masks work at decreasing the spread of COVID and other respiratory illnesses. Masks — regular old surgical masks — are all that most people providing care to COVID patients in the hospital wear. N95 masks are typically reserved for times when an invasive airway procedure is planned.
Though there were some COVID cases among caregivers, we did not see nurses, doctors, or respiratory therapists decimated. Masks are used in hospitals against other respiratory illnesses as well –RSV, flu, etc. I have been protected from RSV for 30 years by surgical masks–nothing more. Masks work to decrease spread of respiratory illnesses and are a mainstay in their care in hospitals. Do you believe your own doctor or your doctor friends who recommend masks based on decades of experience or do you demand a randomized controlled trial in the middle of a pandemic in order to be persuaded that the general welfare is best benefitted by masking.
The COVID vaccines work as well. Thanks be to God, President Trump, and Operation Warp Speed that the vaccine rollout happened when it did and mitigated the worst phase of the COVID illness in Dec 2020 – Jan 2021. Daily new cases in the US peaked at ~308,000 around January 8. By mid-February, daily case rate was down to 65,000–an 80% drop–due to the vaccine. The need for boosters and lack of best understanding as to when those should be administered does not take away from vaccine efficacy.
Humility as to the limits of our knowledge is one of my big takeaways from Dr. Thomas Sowell and a chief reason that centrally planned economies cannot work. I agree that the elites in charge do not have all (most) of the answers and that at best, their motivations are mixed. In regard to public health guidance, I agree that the CDC turnarounds throughout COVID have been dizzying.
However, shouldn’t humility about the limits of knowledge work in the other direction too? Shouldn’t humility about the limits of knowledge serve as a fetter to broad proclamations about COVID insight based on Google “research?” Shouldn’t unprecedented notification that the nearby university hospital is full and canceling elective surgeries — as well as all the private hospitals in a city — prompt a personal response other than a comparison that COVID is no worse than the flu? Shouldn’t conservatives, of all people, recognize a connection between our personal behavior and the public good?
Starting 20 years ago on “Oprah,” I recognized an aspect of the loss of hierarchy (identified by Richard Weaver in 1948 in “Ideas Have Consequences”) when a world expert on a phenomenon with a depth and breadth of knowledge of a topic would be sat next to a single sufferer of the phenomenon whose emotions were equated to a life of study and concentrated attention to the issue.
Can we still acknowledge that someone may know more about something than I do even if I do not like what they are saying, the way they are saying it, or them? They may be right despite themselves. Should you be so self-assured that you are safe from a bad case of COVID because you never get the flu either and hence a COVID vaccine is unwarranted though you are 56 years old and have five people depending on you in the middle of a pandemic?
Published in Healthcare
Flu season 2018 was full of ICU panic news reports. I never watch tv news so I barely noticed it.
It would be nice to see a regression of full hospitals vs illegal aliens by location.
Betcha. but I don’t know.
Not because they cause disease, although there is some of that — but because a system with no boundaries cannot be run as a system. By definition, it is not a system — a system (among other things) comprises everything within a boundary.
Which area is that?
This news from Florida on CNBC–
Hospital beds are filling up in the meantime, with 86% of in-patient beds in use compared with 74% nationwide as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by the Department of Health and Human Services. Across the U.S., roughly 10% of all hospital beds are being used to treat Covid patients, while nearly 28% of the beds in Florida are occupied by them — the highest of any state, the data shows.
Please note that in the US, maybe 50-65% ICU beds are being used by non-covid patients. 20-25% for covid, the rest empty and waiting. Either here or at aceofspades or instapundit or americanthinker there was a link to a site that shows real time ICU numbers by state. The wording of the ICU panic is misleading.
Edited to say those numbers were from 2 ok rd 3 days ago.
The “crisis” also has to do with staffing–having enough nurses to serve patients. Florida is having a challenge trying to staff up.
It does look better in Wisconsin:
than Mississippi, where it is as bad (daily new cases) as it ever was:
Let’s remember that a hospital needs to maintain a certain level of capacity — the average is about 70-75% capacity — in order to continue to exist. They are generally for-profit establishments. An empty hospital makes no profit and contributes to higher healthcare costs.
If the news is saying that nationwide our hospitals are 74% full, that’s . . . very average and should alarm nobody.
The South.
I listen to medical professionals. I listen to my doctor–but not to the exclusion of other sources of information. I’m not, as I suspect many others are not, incapable of processing information from credible sources and determining what sources are credible.
It’s in the nature of most forms of professional advice to be extremely risk averse, and perhaps that’s as it should be. However, the professional can never walk in your own shoes. When this virus was new, there was little to be gained, and much to lose, from questioning certain dictates from medical professionals and the CDC as a whole. That was then. Now there is a vast amount of credible information out there–some of it contradictory. I’ll listen to my doctor but I’m also aware that goalposts have shifted from “This will kill you” to “This is highly transmissible.” At some point, you have to make a personal decision about how to get on with your life..
Thank you for saying that. After getting badgered and chewed upon on other posts for saying I don’t understand why people refuse to be vaccinated, it’s good to see some support.
Seriously, if we’d all admit to and promote the fact that there are early effective treatments, little of what we’ve gone through since March 2020 would have had to happen. None of these discussions, few articles written, none of the fear, none of the name calling, no schools closed, no Zoom fatigue, no DHS domestic terrorist designation. As much as 80% of the deaths (half a million) may have been prevented. Even though it’s too late for all that, we still need to think of and speak about covid with pre-hospital treatments in mind to dispel the virus and the fear.
True, of course, it is a personal decision, and should always remain so.
Speaking only for myself, I can process and understand other sources of information, too, but I don’t know what I don’t know. My doctor does know what I don’t know. He can filter the info in a way that I can’t.
It’s the same when I have clients who insist they know the law on something, and they’re basing that knowledge on a case they read about, and that they even understood perfectly well – but they don’t know why their case will be different in the court’s eyes because of a certain fact, or that the case they read was decided under laws of a different jurisdiction, or that the law has changed, or whatever. They don’t know what they don’t know.
But if you suspect your doctor is too risk averse or otherwise not giving you good advice, you can always get a 2nd opinion from another one. Either way, I wouldn’t trust myself to evaluate info I’d found online. But everyone’s situation is different, I suppose.
I spent a couple of weeks in Hawaii last year, quarantining with a great view of the cops chasing people off the beach at Waikiki.
Of ALL the things to not let people do. Sunlight, saltwater, and exercise would do more to curb the spread than locking people up.
Infuriating.
Lockdowns are just socialism when it comes to argument and policy. No matter what facts are brought to bear about how the lockdowns haven’t eliminated the thing, we will just be told that “real” lockdowns haven’t been tried.
Is there such a thing? I don’t think we even know what the real numbers are. The CDC says that there are close to 37M cases. They also say that they estimate that 15-40% of cases are asymptomatic. (Which is, of course, a margin of error you could fly a B-52 through.)
What they don’t tell us is if that 37M are padded with estimates of asymptomatic infections or not. They tell us that there have been 1.5M more positive tests than actual cases so that stat is meaningless. You can’t get an accurate positivity rate if you’re testing people over and over again unless you know the exact number of those tested multiple times. If they have that number they’re not readily sharing it.
One thing that all the stats compilers do not supply is the total number of cases that required hospitalizations. They like to deal in rolling averages. For the State of Ohio, they say the total number of hospitalizations has been 63,745 out of 1,168,111 reported cases. That’s 5%. And the mortality rate is listed at 1.76%. But again, are the cases underreported? Probably.
If you can extrapolate Ohio’s numbers to the nation, that would mean there has been 1.8M hospitalizations over the course of the pandemic. (The difference between the reported mortality rate for Ohio and the nation are negligible.)
Ok. My local hospital New Hanover Regional Medical Center had 93 COVID patients 2 days ago. 81 not vaccinated, 12 vaccinated. The ICUs are almost full. The nursing staff are burned out. Elective surgeries are currently cancelled.
That is an interesting way to look at the issue. But that doesn’t mean we don’t get to have an opinion.
Fauci’s initial statement was based on years of actual research and data, and it was the truth.
The lie is what came after his flip-flop, which was politically expedient. Your opinion is incorrect, and duly noted. A great reason why people should be free to do what they feel is best.
This is patently false. Hospitals virtually always run at capacity during cold and flu season, and this is because people (or at least certain people) come into the hospital when they are ill. It is only now that we are labeling virtually everything covid.
Say whatever you want about the physician in these videos – he has surely been dismissed out of hand by anyone who disagrees with him, as that is the climate we live in. But you cannot claim to “be a doctor” and that people should “listen to doctors” when there are so many doctors, epidemiologists, scientists, etc… taking positions that differ from yours. Appeals to authority don’t really work when there is no actual authority, and when people with similar credentials disagree.
That said – please consider what is said in the video titled “lecture 2,” and report back. The changes in the way CDC has set the reporting standards for covid explain a whole hell of a lot.
https://brownstone.org/articles/five-presentations-on-viruses-and-epidemics-by-dr-dan-stock/
I hope you understand why this is not even remotely persuasive. I have not worn a mask for 18 months. In fact, I have never worn a mask. I have not gotten COVID (or, if I did, it was asymptomatic, as is also the case for you). I do know many people who have worn masks religiously throughout the entire past year and a half, who did get COVID.
Does that prove that masks cause covid?
This is certainly the case in my area. Many nurses and hospital workers are quitting due to the recent vaccine mandate. There are many other reasons why our local hospital are currently experiencing a staff shortage. None of it is because of covid; ALL of it is because of the behavior of hospital administrators. This is a self-made “crisis.”
Not terribly encouraging for the average American reluctant to get vaccinated when they see thousands of hospital workers and other medical professionals refuse to do so.
What great news! If these vaccines work as well as claimed, and 70% of the people in this country are protected, with something like 93% of vulnerable people protected, then all we need is for this virus to rip through the unvaccinated population, and they will all be either dead or protected (far more likely the latter). Funny thing about that – take a look at the Florida (and texas, etc…) graphs. Just as Delta peaked and burned out in the UK, it has peaked and is burning out in many parts of the US.
Unless this isn’t about actually “protecting people.” Maybe it’s mostly just about control… nah. That would be historically unprecedented, right?
The vast majority are in fact vaccinated.
Yeah…ignore the optics of hospital workers on strike protesting forced vaccinations. My bad.
I haven’t seen those videos. But they must be better than last year’s omnipresent videos of dancing hospital workers commanding us to never leave the house.
Our local Hospitals put in a vaccine mandate. The Public is vaccinated between 60-70% and health care workers are vaccinated at a much higher rate. The Hospital CEO anticipates a 2% staff turn over from the mandate. 2% of the staff of a Hospital would look like a significant strike but really isn’t. Earlier in the year there were Hospital worker’s going on Strike for higher wages because they had to deal with so many sick people.
Here you go…here’s a link to several of them on YouTube.
Wasn’t this supposed to refute Kozak saying the Vast Majority of Hospital workers were vaccinated. Your video says that in a Health Care System of 25,000 employees, 178 did not want to be vaccinated. I think that would qualify as a vast majority.
No, I was referring specifically to the optics of hospital workers refusing to be vaccinated and how that might discourage those hesitant to be vaccinated. See my Comment #52.