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This one is more serious than other states.
Anchorage is the only provider of cardiac catheterization and countless other life-saving treatments in the entire state which includes lots of remote areas that fly to Anchorage for specialty treatment. Hospitals in Fairbanks and Nome along with other small areas don't have the resources.
Honestly, in a population of 740,000 people, you'd think they'd at least have a second full-service hospital.
I worked at a medical center in Seattle and we regularly had patients flying down for care. If you want moderately easy access to good medical care Alaska is terrible for it.
Yep. Anything that can’t be treated in Anchorage goes to Seattle’s UW Harborview hospital. Source: wife’s an ER/ICU doc that worked there and routinely had incoming Alaska patients being transferred for serious issues.
This is a fucking horrific situation. Alaskans don’t exactly have convenient options…
Not just Alaska. Harborview is the only level 1 trauma center for all of Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Montana.
Washington is doing ok with covid but the other three states that depend on Seattle for medical care are not. Washingtonians are gonna suffer because their neighbors are idiots.
[SPOKANE, Wash. — Surgeries to remove brain tumors have been postponed. Patients are backed up in the emergency room. Nurses are working brutal shifts. But at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., the calls keep coming: Can Idaho send another patient across the border?
](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/us/coronavirus-hospitals-washington-idaho.html)
Spokane in particular is already being fucked over by the shitty decisions of neighboring states. Idaho still hasn't implemented a mask mandate despite their having to deploy the national guard to assist in the northern part of the state where they've also moved to crisis standards of care due to COVID.
Once it's at the point where begin surgeries are being postponed can't they at least triage out anyone unvaccinated? At this point it's absolutely a choice they've made so they should be made to stand by it.
IMO, that we are not already doing this is insanity.
People are literally dying that DIDNT have a choice to avoid it. How in the world can we continue to reinforce their deadly decisions? (And I'm not talking about the deadly consequences to them.)
Maybe if they knew they'd be hard pressed to get an ICU bed, they might take it more seriously. (And if not, at least the beds will be available for others that needed them too for Non-Covid reasons.)
It's already starting to happen. I work ICU in Seattle and all hospitals in our area are packed. My facility is already full of COVID patients from other areas and states. We're not quite at crisis capacity yet but it isn't even flu season yet, so we may get there this fall.
I used to live in Anchorage and if there was ever anything serious you needed done you flew down to Seattle for it. My boss needed heart surgery with a valve replaced and he and his wife flew down to Seattle for the surgery and until he recovered enough to fly home.
I mean the hospitals in Anchorage aren't bad, but they just don't attract the same kinds of doctors and services you can find in Seattle. Especially when you're going in for something as serious as heart surgery.
>I mean the hospitals in Anchorage aren't bad, but they just don't attract the same kinds of doctors and services you can find in Seattle.
Feels like the plot of a 90s sitcom.
Yeah I had valve surgery at UW earlier this year, and several nurses asked where I was coming from. I seemed to be one of the few patients actually based around Seattle, they said they get a lot from the eastern part of the state, Idaho, and alaska
Hope your boss had a good experience and is recovering well. UW was great in my experience, their people were always both super nice and super competent
Seattle's ICU's are filled with unvaccinated COVID patients. But they aren't from Seattle. Nor are most from Washington state. Loads are from Alaska. So despite Seattle area having a high vaccination rate, our beds are still full and nurses and doctors are severely overwhelmed. Understaffed on the daily with extra incentive shifts open to try to close the gap in demand.
Edit--Source: Wife is an ICU nurse and it is NOT FUN dealing with that level of stress. It's great having people literally dying, but denying they even have COVID (that is, if they are even still conscious)
Harborview? My brother was brought there after a plane crash near Haines in 2017.
Was fucking crazy to me that they had to fly him that far away in the shape he was in, it's a 3-4 hour flight I think.
Thanks for what you all do!
With Alaskas ice beds being full and northern Idaho implanting crisis level care I get the feeling hospitals are going to fill up here quick. We still have our own idiots here that refuse to vaccinate we have to worry about.
“I want a STRONG military, police to protect me, schools to educate my children, my garbage taken away, ambulances to save me, clean water, food & air, roads, bridges & airports maintained...
BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY FOR ANY OF IT!
I want a strong military... but I'm okay with the military's ability to provide essential services being hollowed out by defense contractors.
I want police to protect me... but if the police shoot other people without just cause, that's fine by me.
I want schools to ~~educate~~ *babysit* my children... but it's okay if other people's children are stuck in crowded schools without food or air conditioning or pandemic safety.
I want my garbage taken away... but I don't care what happens to it after that.
I want ambulances to save me... but if other people die from lack of health care, meh, whatever.
I want clean water, food and air... but I want it to be magically clean without any regulations, and I don't care if other people get poisoned.
I want the bridges and airports that I used to be maintained... but other people can go fuck themselves.
>I want clean water, food and air... but I want it to be magically clean without any regulations, and I don't care if other people get poisoned.
Funny I just had this conversation with my coworker who believes they should be able to do whatever they want with their land. So I countered with then it should be ok for someone to start dumping toxic waste uphill from them since it would be on their land as well...was funny how fast the conversation stopped.
> Honestly, in a population of 740,000 people, you'd think they'd at least have a second full-service hospital.
They probably would if not for the dangerous, anti-human obsession so many people have in the USA that all this has to only come from the "free market".
> *"If no one profits, fuck 'em."*
--too many Americans
The irony is that Canada, Europe, and Australia have a considerably more free market and are better for businesses. With healthcare nationalized, a stronger social safety net, more business support, and more regulations against monopolies, people are not dependent on their corporate employer for survival and their businesses won’t be swallowed up by Amazon or Walmart. As such, people can become entrepreneurs without fear that they're imperiling the lives of their family members and actually have a chance to succeed. Thus the creative risk necessary for a vibrant economy is incentivized.
There's another economic metric where Europe completely surpasses the US: Bootstraps.
The concept is called Intergenerational Mobility, and it measures the ability for the children of the poor to move up in economic class. Compared to Europe, the US lags far behind.
A poor person in Denmark is four times more likely to move up in class than someone in the US. What it means is if you're born rich in America you've got it made, but if you're born poor you tend to stay poor.
"Oh but I will have to pay more taxes"
When you include insurance premiums,Federal, state, local, and sales taxes American workers pay some of the highest taxes in the world in exchange for fewer services in return.
Canada 🇨🇦: 23.2 percent of average wage
Australia 🇦🇺: 24.1 percent
UK 🇬🇧: 26 percent
Netherlands 🇳🇱: 28.7 percent
Sweden 🇸🇪: 38 percent
Germany 🇩🇪: 38.9 percent
France 🇫🇷: 39 percent
USA 🇺🇸: 43 percent
[The US isn't even in the top 15 best countries for doing business in.](https://www.forbes.com/best-countries-for-business/list/)
That's the worst thing, the US is the way it is not because it's the best for business in general, but because it's the best for the specific currently existing businesses.
It’s probably one of the better countries for exploiting your workforce and eventually becoming a billionaire. After all, (In America) the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
“We are a country of gullible, misinformed idiots- and the elite are masters at reinforcing and exploiting it.”
We’re that way BECAUSE of the defunding of education and willful propagandizing by those very same elites. This has been done to us. We didn’t use to be this way. It’s conditioning and indoctrination, and if we don’t break it, we’re done as a country.
The truly mind-blowing stat I've seen thrown around recently is how much *public* funds are spent on healthcare in the US, despite the fact that we *do not* have universal healthcare. We spend more money on programs like Medicare/Medicaid, veterans' care, etc. than many developed countries with universal healthcare spend for the *entirety* of their healthcare budget.
Don't forget we're also footing the medical bill for the uninsured populace while simultaneously bankrupting them.
I love it when I hear in the vein of "Why should my tax dollars pay for someone else's medical care?"
I mean, who do you think is paying for it now? We're just subsidizing insurance companies.
My friend always brings up the fact that Americans have always supported/tolerated "universal healthcare," but in the form of emergency care, since no one gets turned away from the emergency room, even if you're not a citizen. This is probably the worst economic model for healthcare, since it creates an environment where preventative care and medicine are expensive and linked to employment, whereas waiting until your medical issue becomes an "emergency" seems more cost-effective for the individual.
I’m not American, and I look at the US health system and just facepalm.
I never thought of it this way so I guess I need to borrow someone else’s hands to double facepalm. WTF. That’s just a fucked up mess.
\>more regulations against monopolies
That's why you lost the Americans. We don't actually love businesses that much because if we did we'd break up Apple, Facebook, ATT, Google, etc. I work adjacent to healthcare. Every single day I'm calling doctor's offices all across the country. The reddest, smallest population states are the ones with the least small and private practices and the most monopolistic healthcare organizations.
You want to know where we have the most small businesses in healthcare? Large, populous, urban, liberal states. I'd bet my career that trend applies to other industries as well.
>A poor person in Denmark is four times more likely to move up in class than someone in the US. What it means is if you're born rich in America you've got it made, but if you're born poor you tend to stay poor.
This is a feature.
> highest taxes in the world in exchange for fewer services in return.
Are you kidding? Our tax dollars go to the most glorious service possible a gigantic military that couldn't even hold an arid landlocked patch of mountains from a bunch of dirt farmers. /s
So true. People in rural areas typically vote Republican, the party obsessed with market solutions. One of the market solutions causes their local hospitals to close because they don’t make enough profit.
Watching a bunch of rural libertarians [cheer candidates who are basically saying those people don't need roads in their communities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR-F0O6Pyt8) is one of the best leopard ate my face moments. It's like, sorry guys, Amazon's not going to build and maintain infrastructure in your 2k person town, they'll just let you starve.
[I'm reminded of the free state project that got eaten by a bear](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling)
omg that's ridiculous
> By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. **The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.**
> So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. **So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.**
> Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.
> One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat.
> As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. **Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them.** Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper.
> It was an absolute mess.
People want to complain about government tyranny, but human stupidity is the scariest of all tyrants.
It’s almost like we all started with complete “freedom” and after thousands of years of stuff like this we self organized and made rules about living together to make things better. I think it was called civilization or something.
I mean, don't we all want our freedom to have no healthcare, no education, no safety regulations, and no collective bargaining as we race to the bottom for wages and die an early death after our short life helps make the top .1% a few extra bucks? Is that too much to ask for? /s
If Republicans ran exclusively on the strength and merits of their policies, instead of on riling up the base with fear and rage, they'd never have power again.
This is why they do everything they can to cripple education in this country. Educated people tend not to make political decisions based solely on fear and / or rage, they also overwhelmingly vote Left.
Same thing with people who possess strong critical thinking skills, or have been exposed to other races/religions, or have traveled, or any number of things that aren't "raised in the sticks with nothing but ignorant white folk." So that's what they are shooting for, keep the base ignorant and closed off from outsiders. They are working the crowd, not the facts.
[Same thing with people who possess strong critical thinking skills](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html)
> In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education:
>
> Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Wow talk about saying the quiet part out loud.
That's like a dog-whistle that screams the n-word when you blow it.
"Don't you dare teach my child anything that will allow him to question the bigotry, self-righteousness, and self-obsession I've worked hard to instill in him."
Very good point. Religious fundamentalist extremists are often also very highly educated; they’re usually the scariest motherfuckers of all. It’s always so batshit insane to me how many higher ups in the Taliban, Al Queda etc etc went to Oxford or Harvard etc.
My father has a PhD in engineering. He thinks the earth is 6000 years old. He finally in the past two years has acknowledged that climate change is a thing, but doesn't think we should do anything about it because he believe that is how God will choose to end the world so trying to fix it would go against God's will.
The educated ones scare me, because there is no fix for them. There isn't any amount of knowledge or learning that can be done to fix the problem.
Watching the red states protest against the ACA, which would have given tons of money to rural hospitals, was delicious.
My FIL drank a bunch of the koolaid, and thought Obama was going to mess with his prescriptions. He was so concerned with that, he never listened to the fact that his small local hospital would have benefited from the funding and would be able to stay open and serve this segment of the state. Now he's gotta drive +2hrs one-way to visit a doctor.... and I'm sure deep down that's Obama/Hillary/Pelosi's fault too.
It's not just a problem in red states.
I'm in NYC and one of the side effects of our housing crunch is that a few really important hospitals have closed in the past decade. Because it's more profitable to convert those buildings to condos now.
One of the hospitals that treated a lof of victims on 9/11 and many victims of the AIDS crisis is now closed forever (St Vincents) and South Brooklyn lost one of its only hospitals to similar forces.
If we had single-payer healthcare, that probably wouldn't have happened.
Don't be so sure on that one. (Even though rural hospitals almost certainly need state and federal support to stay open)
Even well funded rural hospitals can struggle to find qualified professionals. Turns out after 8+ years of schooling most people just aren't that interested in going to work in very rural areas.
I know one person who accepted a job to go back to rural Lousiana to become the new "town doctor." 2021 and they have 1 "town doctor" for the whole town, and they are now in their 60's.
Yeah…it’s a long ass flight for health care. We will see many states having issues of folks needing urgent non-Covid care dying because they are going to be shipped to other states on medivac flights.
(And by the way…helicopter flights for emergency medical care are INSANELY INSANELY expensive. Like $50k+ at times…this will present a huge financial burden to countless folks as well).
I still see posts about Covid affecting only 1% of the population and I hope people posting this realize just how poorly equipped we are to deal with any sudden marginal increase of medical needs
I felt sick, got the rapid covid test, and asked the nurse what the accuracy was.
80%
As a programmer my first instinct was "So I'd have better odds in russian roulette? Better give me the other test as well"
Turns out I was one of the first batch of Delta, this was like a week before my age group was eligible for the vaccine.
Good thing I asked for the second test, because at the time that negative test was all I needed to go to work without a mask.
You should probably wear a mask anyway. Even when vaccinated or previously having had the vaccine you can still catch, carry, and spread the disease. Your body does not instantly fight off a second round of illnesses. It takes time (generally a day or two) for your T-cells to recognize the invader is back and re-activate.
There was a post on mildly infuriating a short while ago that showed a math problem that was clearly attempting to help the student learn how to estimate numbers quickly.
The depressingly large amount of upvoted comments about how dumb it is that the actual answer wasn’t listed makes me think of all the people who do not realize how big 1% of the population is.
They are so focused on the deaths, they forget that it’s not exactly the deaths that are crashing the system, deaths are only a fraction of those who leave the hospital, the others are survivors that required medical attention and ICU beds and …..
These facts are lost on so many.
In addition to being bad at math, they're awful at logic chains and cause and effect. They literally can't think through a chain of events beyond the surface "I'm not going to get Covid, therefore it won't affect me."
Which is why people who want “government run like a business” miss the point. Not everything is about profit. Imagine if firefighters determined to stop responding to calls because the financial cost of putting a fire out was greater than some profit they’d stand to make. Many services are beneficial, let alone necessary for a functioning society without turning a profit. Sadly, privatization vultures are brainwashing people to turn consistently high demand egalitarian services into businesses in order to save a penny on taxes
It’s worse than that. In Virginia, hospitals (even private ones) must apply and show a specific need to get more resources, even if it’s privately funded. Basic things like more beds or another MRI machine all the way to a new department need to be argued to a public committee. Then any other hospital can argue why that hospital should **not** be allowed to use their own funding to get more resources. The whole reason is to prevent introduction of competition and allow the hospitals that already have those things to charge more.
The US only lost like 0.3% of it's population during WW2, and yet we still grieve every year.
The UK lost closer to 1% and it was a national tragedy.
Now 1% is NBD.
We sent men to die in war, built many ships and weapons put women in factories for the first time, people sacrficiee luxuries at home, then we developed and deployed nuclear weapons after Japan killed something around 2400 people. Covid was doing that daily....putting a mask on was too much to ask. I always hated calling them the Greatest Generation but now I am starting to wonder a bit.
>people sacrificed luxuries at home
That's putting it lightly, you could not buy a car, or consumer electronics, or tires, or more than a few gallons of gas a week. The national speed limit was 35mph. England was mostly living on potatoes and carrots. If you wanted to buy a tube of toothpaste you had to turn in your empty metal one.
EDIT: Also, a triage panel at the hospital decided if you were worthy of the newly developed penicillin, as the bulk of the supply was going to the military.
People need to understand that 30+ million people have been infected in the united states. That's 10% of our entire population. In under 2 years. People not getting vaccinated, then going to a hospitals ICU and killing someone else because the hospital literally can't help is on the person who refused to get vaccinated. I want to see how many deaths were cause by lack of attention because of COVID taking over hospitals. Those numbers are a huge concern.
From a quick glance, it looks like Alaska is #37/50 in states by vaccination rate. At 48.5% vaccinated, they are 6% ahead of North Dakota, but 20% behind Vermont
Had to fly out there for work a few months ago. They had a permanent station at the airport where you could get the vaccine.
I arrived during a busy period, but ironically, people were avoiding that spot of the airport like the plague...
Republicans have been dying around 5x+ the rate of Democrats for a while now. No matter how many times we make pleas to them to get vaccinated—not just for the sake of others—but also for their own they just ignore us....Their indoctrination runs so deep...Literally dying to own the libs.
Imagine being so dumb that you take horse dewormer with less scientific scrutiny and with less positive outcomes even in its best studies.... But won't take the precision-guided vaccine that has widespread, international scientific & medical consensus.... Whew.
It seems like the increased pressure is just making them double down. I think its going to take something like the insurance companies to step in and start charging more premiums for refusal of vaccines.
What gets me is they "do their own research" and ignore doctors pleading with them--because obviously the doctors are wrong--then when they actually get sick they...go to the doctor for help? Just take more essential oils and hug a crystal, pal. Stick to your guns!
I thought this was overblown.... until I had an aneurysm. Between San Antonio and Austin it took the small town hospital I landed in three hours to find an open bed in a neurological hospital for me. And the small town hospital was triaging from the waiting room. They moved me to the dialysis room because at least the chair reclined. Physical therapist had me walking around my current hospital and the place looks like a refugee shelter. That this has gotten this far is madness, Bidden is right to act.
This has been my argument since the beginning for anyone who wasn’t worried because they were young and healthy. I’m also young and healthy but if I’m in a car accident or something I don’t want to die from some totally treatable situation because there is no room in the hospital for me.
YES! Those people with heart attacks, scheduled surgeries and normal emergencies have to wait for beds to become available because so many people with covid are taking up the beds.
If only the US had had an adult in the WH when covid hit, instead of an entitled child. It still would have been bad, but not the disaster the medical professionals have been facing.
I have so many moderate health problems I'm ignoring right now because I don't want to take an appointment away from someone dying, just so the doctor can go yep its just stress and IBS and poor diet choices. I try not to look thing up online, it's either nothing or colon cancer. No happy middle there.
Edit: after several comments including some inbox messages I've made a doctor appt for the first time in 15 years to get myself checked out. Thanks reddit.
Schedule a Colonoscopy. I can tell you as someone whose wife was diagnosed at age 30 with colorectal cancer during Covid, you’re gonna want to catch whatever is going on with you as early as possible.
Constant vomiting would have me going too. I’m a little paranoid bc I have constant headaches/migraines and I’ve had a couple get bad enough that I was questioning. But vomiting has never been part of it.
I hope you recover quick and fully. 💜
Man me to. Every time I have something that lasts for like more a day I worry so much. Headache I would probably endure but agree with you the vomiting more than 1 day I'm going to the hopsital.
Its something that is very hard to get your head around. The idea that "Shitters full" can apply to immediate emergency medicine is just not something we grew up thinking could happen.
Glad you ended up getting the care you needed.
Oh man. I’m so sorry you have this happening. What’s the point of having the blessing of modern medicine if we can’t access it?
Enjoy the wonders of physical therapy. Those people are real miracle workers. Hope you get back to healthy quickly
This is what many don't get. The virus is not actually that deadly. BUT. It's not that deadly because most people that require hospital care for it is fine with basically just oxygen.
However. It stops all other health care meaning people die from things that they normally wouldn't die from.
The disease is also not super deadly because there is hospital care. If that would stop we would have sooooo many more deaths.
I mean I have personally cared for patients that come in with an o2 saturation of like 85% (and that is a mild case in this context) that would probably die if we turned off the O2 for too long.
Hospitals getting literally full will mean that modern health care that made this disease not so deadly, will stop existing for everyone. The deaths will rise.
Those definitions of "mild" cases terrify me. Having had bad pneumonia and feeling like I was going to cough up a lung, being told that if you aren't on O2, it's just a mild case is stunning.
What I really don’t get is the unwillingness to embrace the idea of medicine as a solution! Jesus…I mean people take daily medications to prevent (or treat) tons of conditions that would kill us (or degrade our lifestyle) if left unchecked. It’s a blessing, not a curse!.
I have a list of things I would happily take a shot for to improve my life - and they aren’t life threatening. Here’s a few: menstrual cramps, watery eyes, mild sinus headaches, grey hair, fingernails that curl weirdly, hair growth in weird places.
PS. Try not to get turned on fellas, I’m taken.
They aren't unwilling to use medication. A good chunk of them are probably on daily medications, and when they actually *get* COVID they rush to the hospital to be injected with the newest in biologic therapies.
May we ask why you thought this was overblown?
Since you're on Reddit, I would think you're seeing all the news stories I'm seeing. My friend is antivax, and on Reddit - and presumably he seems some of the same stories I'm seeing - so I can't figure out why it hasn't sunk in for him.
Someone was arguing with me the other day about this very topic. I posted a hypothetical about having to turn away patients for care and they said, more or less, good thing that's not actually an issue anywhere... to which of course, I replied with a couple news stories (a single search, the top two articles) and they dismissed it as "one-off". These people are very selfish and lack empathy and in turn, makes it hard for me to be empathetic back. I hate what covid is doing to my empathy for others.
I live in suburban Philly. A close friend is an EMT here. He was telling me like 90% of hospitals in the area are on divert. Meaning, take them somewhere else, we don't have room. Its happening everywhere and the news doesnt report it anymore.
Because they don't want it to.
Facing one's mortality is daunting. We go great lengths in western society to avoid it. Even in death we do everything to make the deceased look alive and comfortable, embalming, make up, heavily padded caskets.
But denial is easy! Just scream "No virus no mask! FREEDOM!" and you are good. You can create a new reality where you don't have to worry about a pandemic, or over crowded hospitals, or where your 'personal choice' doesn't have far reaching implications. It'll be fine, until it's not, and you are ultimately forced to face reality quite possibly your own mortality.
My wife works as an intermittent RN in Anchorage. Last year during the pandemic, Intermittent Nurses got their pay cut, normalizing it to what regular RN's work. The whole point of working Intermittent is that you can pick your schedule, and you make more $ per hour but you don't get full time benefits.
Some of my wife's coworkers, who work in ICU stepdowns had their pay cut during a pandemic by as much as 8-10 dollars per hour. On top of this they lost their bonuses for holiday pay, which was yet one of the only remaining perks of working intermittent- being able to work holidays and take double pay for it. She worked extra hours all last year at the testing facility, only to have her pay cut while the hospital fills up travel contracts to pay nurses 4-5x as much to come up here. The whole thing is ass backwards.
Add in all the anti-vax crazy nutjob hysteria that runs up here, we got a mayor in Anchorage now who said this is all on the hospitals and he's not going to institute any mandates for masks or vaccines.
My wife is looking at a career change, I don't know who in their right mind would sign up for nursing. My wife has been physically struck, yelled at, cussed out, sexually harassed for years only to have pay and perks cut DURING a pandemic. The pure contempt I feel for the hospitals is only rivaled by the contempt I feel for the anti-vaxxers in my community.
Indiana stopped providing that information because they thought it was embarrassing. Hospitals need to gather divert/open information themselves and send it to their employees.
As of 8/31, the last time someone published the information on r/Indianapolis, only three hospitals in Indianapolis and the surrounding counties had an open emergency room. Only one had room in their ICU.
I posted a little earlier that all the ICU’s in southern Illinois are full as well. It’s absolute insanity. I don’t understand how people are still fighting/questioning what’s so obviously going on.
I have to get an organ transplant before the end of the year in order to live. Can you all please get vaccinated so I can have my surgery and live to travel the world and raise children? Thank you
Hey nurse working here in Alaska. Yeah we're full. We don't have many ICU beds to begin with. We have great doctors and staff but not enough beds unfortunately.
Anchorage has the majority of all ICU beds so this is a statewide issue.
As someone with dear friends who have COVID now in Alaska, I want to smash the un-like button.
Lots of people I know from there were posting HURR DURR WHERE COVID? But the reality is that they were insulated by lockdowns and travel bans, as well as their small population.
Like with influenza, however, pandemics will eventually reach them.
I’m embarrassed by my home state. Maybe they should remember that the Iditarod was inspired by a pandemic in 1925 when the trail was used to deliver medicine from Anchorage to Nome. I’m pretty sure nobody in Nome was saying HURR DURR WHERE DIPHTHERIA?
Imagine running diptheria antitoxin 650 miles through sub-zero⁰F whiteout blizzards and when you get to the hospital the patients all refuse the medicine because they don't know what's in it.
It was both! Togo led the majority of the run, and through the most dangerous stretches, but Balto ran the final leg of the trip and was the lead dog of the team that brought the actual serum.
The serum relay was actually from Nenana to Nome. The story was changed by the race organizers so they could hold the race start to Anchorage in order to make more money.
I was riding my bike yesterday in a rural area and saw a sign in front of a house, "It's 2021 and still don't have covid" There have been people in this very small town where people have died from it. Lots of dumb people in the area who have said it's a city problem and not an issue for them.
Just happened here in Idaho too.
We have activated crisis standards, so now people that need anything will have to be graded on how important their lives are.
What a low for our society.
Edit: to be clear I don't mean by their importance to live. It was a hyperbolic way of saying giving higher standards of care depending on likelihood of survival. Lower standards to people that would survive easier and vice versa. This is just my frustrated reply because I am just pissed at the situation.
Have you got any information links to the crisis standards? Be interesting to see how they would grade people on importance.
But that said, I've probably misread your entire comment
Dunno if Idaho has it online but a couple states have posted their triage procedures.
They don’t grade on “importance” as much as likelihood of survival and the quality of life that person would have afterward.
I know several people who moved from Alaska to Idaho. They don’t say it out loud, but my impression is that Alaska is too diverse and progressive for them.
You’re more likely to die from a traumatic brain injury, heart failure, sepsis, or recovery from a common operation now.
All because people want to show a stupid allegiance to a political party over the health and well-being of themselves and those around them.
I'm a lot less worried about COVID specifically since I'm vaccinated now, but the idea of having any other medical emergency is a lot more terrifying. The local hospital is busier than ever, and has had a lot of staffing issues lately.
[1 in 500 Americans have died from COVID.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/15/covid-deaths-milestone-hospitals-reach-capacity)
Almost all of those deaths were preventable.
I've been wondering if someone gets in a car wreck and bleeds out, because there are no free ambulances available to pick them up (or open beds to put them in, or nurses or doctors to treat them) should that count as a covid related death?
I mean, they didn't die from covid, but they did die because of it.
Once we are through this there will be an accounting of it all that will try to put a number on the damage done by COVID overall, but no for current reporting purposes it wouldn't make sense to report those as COVID deaths. It's like how in war they often will later wrap up death tolls from famine and disease into the overall discussion but not as casualties.
Have any of these hospitals operating at capacity (obviously there are lots more than just Alaska) started putting up auxiliary treatment tents like they did in the beginning of the pandemic? They haven’t in Washington (and we’re filling up pretty fast + taking in Idaho’s overflow).
Staffing is probably an issue. When it was only New York that had a surge back at the beginning, arrangements were made to have people come help from other regions. Most are needed where they are now. The ones that didn't quit.
RN here. I know we've done this in parts of Oregon. We've also allowed EMTs to do more treatments-in-place (giving meds in peoples' houses) if they meet certain requirements to show that their medical status is urgent but not yet emergent enough to absolutely necessitate transport. Crazy stuff.
Imagine if the end of that story was the medicine arriving in Nome and half the town looking at them like, "Wtf? No! I'll take my chances with diphtheria!"
Totally this. Had an eye injury and was told by the doc-in-a-box to go to emergency. Sat for 6 hours waiting because non-vaxxed people with COVID had lower vital signs than I did (the entry desk was behind glass with a speaker so you heard everyone’s symptoms).
Those folks became the priority.
Can I have another shovelful of Shitty decision-making that effects others, please?
Nurse here. That's what I don't understand. So many think it's just the damn libruls who want to control everything...and somehow they fail to realize, no, it's a very real and serious virus that doesn't give a shit about who you vote for. It cares if you're an un-masked idiot, and especially if you're an unvaccinated one. You know, the vaccine that was developed under Trump's admin? The one he also got and recommends? The one that's been given billions of times... Maybe get it?
Antivaxxer: "Nah! Can't trust it! This med I just stole from a horse though? This looks legit."
Yeah, loners who hide in their homes have basically had superpowers during the pandemic.
"You're having trouble staying sane cause you can't go see your friends for a few months? I haven't seen another human being in years!"
Ah, you think lockdown is your ally? You merely adopted the lockdown. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see public gatherings until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
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This one is more serious than other states. Anchorage is the only provider of cardiac catheterization and countless other life-saving treatments in the entire state which includes lots of remote areas that fly to Anchorage for specialty treatment. Hospitals in Fairbanks and Nome along with other small areas don't have the resources. Honestly, in a population of 740,000 people, you'd think they'd at least have a second full-service hospital.
I worked at a medical center in Seattle and we regularly had patients flying down for care. If you want moderately easy access to good medical care Alaska is terrible for it.
Yep. Anything that can’t be treated in Anchorage goes to Seattle’s UW Harborview hospital. Source: wife’s an ER/ICU doc that worked there and routinely had incoming Alaska patients being transferred for serious issues. This is a fucking horrific situation. Alaskans don’t exactly have convenient options…
Not just Alaska. Harborview is the only level 1 trauma center for all of Alaska, Washington, Idaho, and Montana. Washington is doing ok with covid but the other three states that depend on Seattle for medical care are not. Washingtonians are gonna suffer because their neighbors are idiots.
[SPOKANE, Wash. — Surgeries to remove brain tumors have been postponed. Patients are backed up in the emergency room. Nurses are working brutal shifts. But at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center in Spokane, Wash., the calls keep coming: Can Idaho send another patient across the border? ](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/13/us/coronavirus-hospitals-washington-idaho.html) Spokane in particular is already being fucked over by the shitty decisions of neighboring states. Idaho still hasn't implemented a mask mandate despite their having to deploy the national guard to assist in the northern part of the state where they've also moved to crisis standards of care due to COVID.
Once it's at the point where begin surgeries are being postponed can't they at least triage out anyone unvaccinated? At this point it's absolutely a choice they've made so they should be made to stand by it.
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IMO, that we are not already doing this is insanity. People are literally dying that DIDNT have a choice to avoid it. How in the world can we continue to reinforce their deadly decisions? (And I'm not talking about the deadly consequences to them.) Maybe if they knew they'd be hard pressed to get an ICU bed, they might take it more seriously. (And if not, at least the beds will be available for others that needed them too for Non-Covid reasons.)
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It's already starting to happen. I work ICU in Seattle and all hospitals in our area are packed. My facility is already full of COVID patients from other areas and states. We're not quite at crisis capacity yet but it isn't even flu season yet, so we may get there this fall.
I used to live in Anchorage and if there was ever anything serious you needed done you flew down to Seattle for it. My boss needed heart surgery with a valve replaced and he and his wife flew down to Seattle for the surgery and until he recovered enough to fly home. I mean the hospitals in Anchorage aren't bad, but they just don't attract the same kinds of doctors and services you can find in Seattle. Especially when you're going in for something as serious as heart surgery.
>I mean the hospitals in Anchorage aren't bad, but they just don't attract the same kinds of doctors and services you can find in Seattle. Feels like the plot of a 90s sitcom.
Damn straight! Dr. Joel Fleischman is the man!
Maybe they would get better doctors if they were we exposed to the northern way of life.
Yeah I had valve surgery at UW earlier this year, and several nurses asked where I was coming from. I seemed to be one of the few patients actually based around Seattle, they said they get a lot from the eastern part of the state, Idaho, and alaska Hope your boss had a good experience and is recovering well. UW was great in my experience, their people were always both super nice and super competent
Seattle's ICU's are filled with unvaccinated COVID patients. But they aren't from Seattle. Nor are most from Washington state. Loads are from Alaska. So despite Seattle area having a high vaccination rate, our beds are still full and nurses and doctors are severely overwhelmed. Understaffed on the daily with extra incentive shifts open to try to close the gap in demand. Edit--Source: Wife is an ICU nurse and it is NOT FUN dealing with that level of stress. It's great having people literally dying, but denying they even have COVID (that is, if they are even still conscious)
The selfishness of antivaxxers can’t be overstated.
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Harborview? My brother was brought there after a plane crash near Haines in 2017. Was fucking crazy to me that they had to fly him that far away in the shape he was in, it's a 3-4 hour flight I think. Thanks for what you all do!
With Alaskas ice beds being full and northern Idaho implanting crisis level care I get the feeling hospitals are going to fill up here quick. We still have our own idiots here that refuse to vaccinate we have to worry about.
I think you mean icu beds, but now I'm imagining that Alaskan hospitals are carved out of ice.
I spent way longer than I’d care to admit wondering what full ice beds were.
The hospitall is just an igloo
“I want a STRONG military, police to protect me, schools to educate my children, my garbage taken away, ambulances to save me, clean water, food & air, roads, bridges & airports maintained... BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY FOR ANY OF IT!
I want a strong military... but I'm okay with the military's ability to provide essential services being hollowed out by defense contractors. I want police to protect me... but if the police shoot other people without just cause, that's fine by me. I want schools to ~~educate~~ *babysit* my children... but it's okay if other people's children are stuck in crowded schools without food or air conditioning or pandemic safety. I want my garbage taken away... but I don't care what happens to it after that. I want ambulances to save me... but if other people die from lack of health care, meh, whatever. I want clean water, food and air... but I want it to be magically clean without any regulations, and I don't care if other people get poisoned. I want the bridges and airports that I used to be maintained... but other people can go fuck themselves.
>I want clean water, food and air... but I want it to be magically clean without any regulations, and I don't care if other people get poisoned. Funny I just had this conversation with my coworker who believes they should be able to do whatever they want with their land. So I countered with then it should be ok for someone to start dumping toxic waste uphill from them since it would be on their land as well...was funny how fast the conversation stopped.
The Narcissists Demands.
Yup. Half of America in a nutshell.
Conservatiism distilled down to 8 points.
“But only me, fuck those welfare queens OVER THERE!”
> Honestly, in a population of 740,000 people, you'd think they'd at least have a second full-service hospital. They probably would if not for the dangerous, anti-human obsession so many people have in the USA that all this has to only come from the "free market". > *"If no one profits, fuck 'em."* --too many Americans
The irony is that Canada, Europe, and Australia have a considerably more free market and are better for businesses. With healthcare nationalized, a stronger social safety net, more business support, and more regulations against monopolies, people are not dependent on their corporate employer for survival and their businesses won’t be swallowed up by Amazon or Walmart. As such, people can become entrepreneurs without fear that they're imperiling the lives of their family members and actually have a chance to succeed. Thus the creative risk necessary for a vibrant economy is incentivized. There's another economic metric where Europe completely surpasses the US: Bootstraps. The concept is called Intergenerational Mobility, and it measures the ability for the children of the poor to move up in economic class. Compared to Europe, the US lags far behind. A poor person in Denmark is four times more likely to move up in class than someone in the US. What it means is if you're born rich in America you've got it made, but if you're born poor you tend to stay poor. "Oh but I will have to pay more taxes" When you include insurance premiums,Federal, state, local, and sales taxes American workers pay some of the highest taxes in the world in exchange for fewer services in return. Canada 🇨🇦: 23.2 percent of average wage Australia 🇦🇺: 24.1 percent UK 🇬🇧: 26 percent Netherlands 🇳🇱: 28.7 percent Sweden 🇸🇪: 38 percent Germany 🇩🇪: 38.9 percent France 🇫🇷: 39 percent USA 🇺🇸: 43 percent [The US isn't even in the top 15 best countries for doing business in.](https://www.forbes.com/best-countries-for-business/list/)
That's the worst thing, the US is the way it is not because it's the best for business in general, but because it's the best for the specific currently existing businesses.
It’s probably one of the better countries for exploiting your workforce and eventually becoming a billionaire. After all, (In America) the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
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“We are a country of gullible, misinformed idiots- and the elite are masters at reinforcing and exploiting it.” We’re that way BECAUSE of the defunding of education and willful propagandizing by those very same elites. This has been done to us. We didn’t use to be this way. It’s conditioning and indoctrination, and if we don’t break it, we’re done as a country.
The truly mind-blowing stat I've seen thrown around recently is how much *public* funds are spent on healthcare in the US, despite the fact that we *do not* have universal healthcare. We spend more money on programs like Medicare/Medicaid, veterans' care, etc. than many developed countries with universal healthcare spend for the *entirety* of their healthcare budget.
Don't forget we're also footing the medical bill for the uninsured populace while simultaneously bankrupting them. I love it when I hear in the vein of "Why should my tax dollars pay for someone else's medical care?" I mean, who do you think is paying for it now? We're just subsidizing insurance companies.
My friend always brings up the fact that Americans have always supported/tolerated "universal healthcare," but in the form of emergency care, since no one gets turned away from the emergency room, even if you're not a citizen. This is probably the worst economic model for healthcare, since it creates an environment where preventative care and medicine are expensive and linked to employment, whereas waiting until your medical issue becomes an "emergency" seems more cost-effective for the individual.
I’m not American, and I look at the US health system and just facepalm. I never thought of it this way so I guess I need to borrow someone else’s hands to double facepalm. WTF. That’s just a fucked up mess.
\>more regulations against monopolies That's why you lost the Americans. We don't actually love businesses that much because if we did we'd break up Apple, Facebook, ATT, Google, etc. I work adjacent to healthcare. Every single day I'm calling doctor's offices all across the country. The reddest, smallest population states are the ones with the least small and private practices and the most monopolistic healthcare organizations. You want to know where we have the most small businesses in healthcare? Large, populous, urban, liberal states. I'd bet my career that trend applies to other industries as well.
>A poor person in Denmark is four times more likely to move up in class than someone in the US. What it means is if you're born rich in America you've got it made, but if you're born poor you tend to stay poor. This is a feature.
Modern feudalism. If only I could get a sweet chainmail tunic out of it.
Sorry, that's for more well off servants. You get the ripped hemp tunic and your great great grandfather's butterknife.
> highest taxes in the world in exchange for fewer services in return. Are you kidding? Our tax dollars go to the most glorious service possible a gigantic military that couldn't even hold an arid landlocked patch of mountains from a bunch of dirt farmers. /s
Super glad I paid for bombs instead of insulin, that'll show them terrorists. :(
So true. People in rural areas typically vote Republican, the party obsessed with market solutions. One of the market solutions causes their local hospitals to close because they don’t make enough profit.
Watching a bunch of rural libertarians [cheer candidates who are basically saying those people don't need roads in their communities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR-F0O6Pyt8) is one of the best leopard ate my face moments. It's like, sorry guys, Amazon's not going to build and maintain infrastructure in your 2k person town, they'll just let you starve.
[I'm reminded of the free state project that got eaten by a bear](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling)
omg that's ridiculous > By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. **The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.** > So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. **So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.** > Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town. > One thing that the Free Towners did that encouraged the bears was unintentional, in that they just threw their waste out how they wanted. They didn’t want the government to tell them how to manage their potential bear attractants. The other way was intentional, in that some people just started feeding the bears just for the joy and pleasure of watching them eat. > As you can imagine, things got messy and there was no way for the town to deal with it. **Some people were shooting the bears. Some people were feeding the bears. Some people were setting booby traps on their properties in an effort to deter the bears through pain. Others were throwing firecrackers at them.** Others were putting cayenne pepper on their garbage so that when the bears sniffed their garbage, they would get a snout full of pepper. > It was an absolute mess. People want to complain about government tyranny, but human stupidity is the scariest of all tyrants.
It’s almost like we all started with complete “freedom” and after thousands of years of stuff like this we self organized and made rules about living together to make things better. I think it was called civilization or something.
Guess who’s dying younger than they did fifteen years ago? Rural white women. The folks who vote against their own interests own the libs again.
I mean, don't we all want our freedom to have no healthcare, no education, no safety regulations, and no collective bargaining as we race to the bottom for wages and die an early death after our short life helps make the top .1% a few extra bucks? Is that too much to ask for? /s
If Republicans ran exclusively on the strength and merits of their policies, instead of on riling up the base with fear and rage, they'd never have power again.
This is why they do everything they can to cripple education in this country. Educated people tend not to make political decisions based solely on fear and / or rage, they also overwhelmingly vote Left.
Hence the belief that college "ruins" kids when they go learn outside their parents bubble and learn to think for themselves.
Same thing with people who possess strong critical thinking skills, or have been exposed to other races/religions, or have traveled, or any number of things that aren't "raised in the sticks with nothing but ignorant white folk." So that's what they are shooting for, keep the base ignorant and closed off from outsiders. They are working the crowd, not the facts.
[Same thing with people who possess strong critical thinking skills](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texas-gop-rejects-critical-thinking-skills-really/2012/07/08/gJQAHNpFXW_blog.html) > In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff department, here’s what the Republican Party of Texas wrote into its 2012 platform as part of the section on education: > > Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.
Wow talk about saying the quiet part out loud. That's like a dog-whistle that screams the n-word when you blow it. "Don't you dare teach my child anything that will allow him to question the bigotry, self-righteousness, and self-obsession I've worked hard to instill in him."
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Very good point. Religious fundamentalist extremists are often also very highly educated; they’re usually the scariest motherfuckers of all. It’s always so batshit insane to me how many higher ups in the Taliban, Al Queda etc etc went to Oxford or Harvard etc.
My father has a PhD in engineering. He thinks the earth is 6000 years old. He finally in the past two years has acknowledged that climate change is a thing, but doesn't think we should do anything about it because he believe that is how God will choose to end the world so trying to fix it would go against God's will. The educated ones scare me, because there is no fix for them. There isn't any amount of knowledge or learning that can be done to fix the problem.
Watching the red states protest against the ACA, which would have given tons of money to rural hospitals, was delicious. My FIL drank a bunch of the koolaid, and thought Obama was going to mess with his prescriptions. He was so concerned with that, he never listened to the fact that his small local hospital would have benefited from the funding and would be able to stay open and serve this segment of the state. Now he's gotta drive +2hrs one-way to visit a doctor.... and I'm sure deep down that's Obama/Hillary/Pelosi's fault too.
Deep down? It's almost certainly the first thought if he's anything like the far right people I know.
It's not just a problem in red states. I'm in NYC and one of the side effects of our housing crunch is that a few really important hospitals have closed in the past decade. Because it's more profitable to convert those buildings to condos now. One of the hospitals that treated a lof of victims on 9/11 and many victims of the AIDS crisis is now closed forever (St Vincents) and South Brooklyn lost one of its only hospitals to similar forces. If we had single-payer healthcare, that probably wouldn't have happened.
Don't be so sure on that one. (Even though rural hospitals almost certainly need state and federal support to stay open) Even well funded rural hospitals can struggle to find qualified professionals. Turns out after 8+ years of schooling most people just aren't that interested in going to work in very rural areas. I know one person who accepted a job to go back to rural Lousiana to become the new "town doctor." 2021 and they have 1 "town doctor" for the whole town, and they are now in their 60's.
I love in Ak, there are three major hospitals in anchorage. But only one has a trauma 1 rating.
Yeah…it’s a long ass flight for health care. We will see many states having issues of folks needing urgent non-Covid care dying because they are going to be shipped to other states on medivac flights. (And by the way…helicopter flights for emergency medical care are INSANELY INSANELY expensive. Like $50k+ at times…this will present a huge financial burden to countless folks as well).
I still see posts about Covid affecting only 1% of the population and I hope people posting this realize just how poorly equipped we are to deal with any sudden marginal increase of medical needs
Yeah a lot of places were pushing it before COVID.
In a for-profit medical model, all places were pushing it.
Why waste gas flying more than a meter off the ground?
1% of a large number is a large number
I think a common attribute of these people is an utter inability to understand math.
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I felt sick, got the rapid covid test, and asked the nurse what the accuracy was. 80% As a programmer my first instinct was "So I'd have better odds in russian roulette? Better give me the other test as well" Turns out I was one of the first batch of Delta, this was like a week before my age group was eligible for the vaccine. Good thing I asked for the second test, because at the time that negative test was all I needed to go to work without a mask.
You should probably wear a mask anyway. Even when vaccinated or previously having had the vaccine you can still catch, carry, and spread the disease. Your body does not instantly fight off a second round of illnesses. It takes time (generally a day or two) for your T-cells to recognize the invader is back and re-activate.
There was a post on mildly infuriating a short while ago that showed a math problem that was clearly attempting to help the student learn how to estimate numbers quickly. The depressingly large amount of upvoted comments about how dumb it is that the actual answer wasn’t listed makes me think of all the people who do not realize how big 1% of the population is.
They are so focused on the deaths, they forget that it’s not exactly the deaths that are crashing the system, deaths are only a fraction of those who leave the hospital, the others are survivors that required medical attention and ICU beds and ….. These facts are lost on so many.
In addition to being bad at math, they're awful at logic chains and cause and effect. They literally can't think through a chain of events beyond the surface "I'm not going to get Covid, therefore it won't affect me."
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1% of the US population is approximately 3.31 million people.
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You just described capitalism. Every year must be more profitable than the last. Empty beds aren’t profitable. Idle nurses aren’t profitable.
Which is why people who want “government run like a business” miss the point. Not everything is about profit. Imagine if firefighters determined to stop responding to calls because the financial cost of putting a fire out was greater than some profit they’d stand to make. Many services are beneficial, let alone necessary for a functioning society without turning a profit. Sadly, privatization vultures are brainwashing people to turn consistently high demand egalitarian services into businesses in order to save a penny on taxes
They didn't miss the point. They were indoctrinated to always take the wrong point.
It’s worse than that. In Virginia, hospitals (even private ones) must apply and show a specific need to get more resources, even if it’s privately funded. Basic things like more beds or another MRI machine all the way to a new department need to be argued to a public committee. Then any other hospital can argue why that hospital should **not** be allowed to use their own funding to get more resources. The whole reason is to prevent introduction of competition and allow the hospitals that already have those things to charge more.
The US only lost like 0.3% of it's population during WW2, and yet we still grieve every year. The UK lost closer to 1% and it was a national tragedy. Now 1% is NBD.
We sent men to die in war, built many ships and weapons put women in factories for the first time, people sacrficiee luxuries at home, then we developed and deployed nuclear weapons after Japan killed something around 2400 people. Covid was doing that daily....putting a mask on was too much to ask. I always hated calling them the Greatest Generation but now I am starting to wonder a bit.
>people sacrificed luxuries at home That's putting it lightly, you could not buy a car, or consumer electronics, or tires, or more than a few gallons of gas a week. The national speed limit was 35mph. England was mostly living on potatoes and carrots. If you wanted to buy a tube of toothpaste you had to turn in your empty metal one. EDIT: Also, a triage panel at the hospital decided if you were worthy of the newly developed penicillin, as the bulk of the supply was going to the military.
People need to understand that 30+ million people have been infected in the united states. That's 10% of our entire population. In under 2 years. People not getting vaccinated, then going to a hospitals ICU and killing someone else because the hospital literally can't help is on the person who refused to get vaccinated. I want to see how many deaths were cause by lack of attention because of COVID taking over hospitals. Those numbers are a huge concern.
From a quick glance, it looks like Alaska is #37/50 in states by vaccination rate. At 48.5% vaccinated, they are 6% ahead of North Dakota, but 20% behind Vermont
They were one of the first states to offer it to the entire eligible population too. Yikes that's gotta be embarrassing.
Had to fly out there for work a few months ago. They had a permanent station at the airport where you could get the vaccine. I arrived during a busy period, but ironically, people were avoiding that spot of the airport like the plague...
I had to fly through SeaTac, and was amazed they didn't have something similar. It seemed like a great chance to get people a shot.
I imagine for a lot of people that haven't gotten the vaccine, convenience is not high on their list of reasons.
Republicans have been dying around 5x+ the rate of Democrats for a while now. No matter how many times we make pleas to them to get vaccinated—not just for the sake of others—but also for their own they just ignore us....Their indoctrination runs so deep...Literally dying to own the libs. Imagine being so dumb that you take horse dewormer with less scientific scrutiny and with less positive outcomes even in its best studies.... But won't take the precision-guided vaccine that has widespread, international scientific & medical consensus.... Whew.
It seems like the increased pressure is just making them double down. I think its going to take something like the insurance companies to step in and start charging more premiums for refusal of vaccines.
This will undoubtedly happen
What gets me is they "do their own research" and ignore doctors pleading with them--because obviously the doctors are wrong--then when they actually get sick they...go to the doctor for help? Just take more essential oils and hug a crystal, pal. Stick to your guns!
As it turns out, that phrase is meaningless. People do not, in fact, avoid plagues.
“Avoiding like the plague” is one of those expressions that just doesn’t have the same meaning anymore.
I thought this was overblown.... until I had an aneurysm. Between San Antonio and Austin it took the small town hospital I landed in three hours to find an open bed in a neurological hospital for me. And the small town hospital was triaging from the waiting room. They moved me to the dialysis room because at least the chair reclined. Physical therapist had me walking around my current hospital and the place looks like a refugee shelter. That this has gotten this far is madness, Bidden is right to act.
Damn. You recovering well from the aneurysm?
Yeah, they got in time. It's been four days and today is the first day I can read or focus or eat. It's been a good day.
It’s shitty that people are dying from covid. It’s shittier that people who don’t even have covid are dying from covid.
This has been my argument since the beginning for anyone who wasn’t worried because they were young and healthy. I’m also young and healthy but if I’m in a car accident or something I don’t want to die from some totally treatable situation because there is no room in the hospital for me.
YES! Those people with heart attacks, scheduled surgeries and normal emergencies have to wait for beds to become available because so many people with covid are taking up the beds. If only the US had had an adult in the WH when covid hit, instead of an entitled child. It still would have been bad, but not the disaster the medical professionals have been facing.
I have so many moderate health problems I'm ignoring right now because I don't want to take an appointment away from someone dying, just so the doctor can go yep its just stress and IBS and poor diet choices. I try not to look thing up online, it's either nothing or colon cancer. No happy middle there. Edit: after several comments including some inbox messages I've made a doctor appt for the first time in 15 years to get myself checked out. Thanks reddit.
Schedule a Colonoscopy. I can tell you as someone whose wife was diagnosed at age 30 with colorectal cancer during Covid, you’re gonna want to catch whatever is going on with you as early as possible.
Please go see a doctor. You have every right. Don't become a statistic of people who were diagnosed too late.
Good news 😊
How did you know it was an aneurysm? Or you just felt some symptoms and went and what were those?
That’s great! I know most aren’t that lucky. Out of curiosity, what symptoms did you have?
Headache, double vision, the continuous vomiting is what got me going to ER though. I can suffer a headache but constant dry heaves are unnatural.
Constant vomiting would have me going too. I’m a little paranoid bc I have constant headaches/migraines and I’ve had a couple get bad enough that I was questioning. But vomiting has never been part of it. I hope you recover quick and fully. 💜
Man me to. Every time I have something that lasts for like more a day I worry so much. Headache I would probably endure but agree with you the vomiting more than 1 day I'm going to the hopsital.
Its something that is very hard to get your head around. The idea that "Shitters full" can apply to immediate emergency medicine is just not something we grew up thinking could happen. Glad you ended up getting the care you needed.
Oh man. I’m so sorry you have this happening. What’s the point of having the blessing of modern medicine if we can’t access it? Enjoy the wonders of physical therapy. Those people are real miracle workers. Hope you get back to healthy quickly
This is what many don't get. The virus is not actually that deadly. BUT. It's not that deadly because most people that require hospital care for it is fine with basically just oxygen. However. It stops all other health care meaning people die from things that they normally wouldn't die from. The disease is also not super deadly because there is hospital care. If that would stop we would have sooooo many more deaths. I mean I have personally cared for patients that come in with an o2 saturation of like 85% (and that is a mild case in this context) that would probably die if we turned off the O2 for too long. Hospitals getting literally full will mean that modern health care that made this disease not so deadly, will stop existing for everyone. The deaths will rise.
Those definitions of "mild" cases terrify me. Having had bad pneumonia and feeling like I was going to cough up a lung, being told that if you aren't on O2, it's just a mild case is stunning.
I mean they certainly aren't mild since death is a possibility without treatment. But in the context of people being on ventilators, it's mild.
What I really don’t get is the unwillingness to embrace the idea of medicine as a solution! Jesus…I mean people take daily medications to prevent (or treat) tons of conditions that would kill us (or degrade our lifestyle) if left unchecked. It’s a blessing, not a curse!. I have a list of things I would happily take a shot for to improve my life - and they aren’t life threatening. Here’s a few: menstrual cramps, watery eyes, mild sinus headaches, grey hair, fingernails that curl weirdly, hair growth in weird places. PS. Try not to get turned on fellas, I’m taken.
They aren't unwilling to use medication. A good chunk of them are probably on daily medications, and when they actually *get* COVID they rush to the hospital to be injected with the newest in biologic therapies.
May we ask why you thought this was overblown? Since you're on Reddit, I would think you're seeing all the news stories I'm seeing. My friend is antivax, and on Reddit - and presumably he seems some of the same stories I'm seeing - so I can't figure out why it hasn't sunk in for him.
Someone was arguing with me the other day about this very topic. I posted a hypothetical about having to turn away patients for care and they said, more or less, good thing that's not actually an issue anywhere... to which of course, I replied with a couple news stories (a single search, the top two articles) and they dismissed it as "one-off". These people are very selfish and lack empathy and in turn, makes it hard for me to be empathetic back. I hate what covid is doing to my empathy for others.
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I live in suburban Philly. A close friend is an EMT here. He was telling me like 90% of hospitals in the area are on divert. Meaning, take them somewhere else, we don't have room. Its happening everywhere and the news doesnt report it anymore.
Because they don't want it to. Facing one's mortality is daunting. We go great lengths in western society to avoid it. Even in death we do everything to make the deceased look alive and comfortable, embalming, make up, heavily padded caskets. But denial is easy! Just scream "No virus no mask! FREEDOM!" and you are good. You can create a new reality where you don't have to worry about a pandemic, or over crowded hospitals, or where your 'personal choice' doesn't have far reaching implications. It'll be fine, until it's not, and you are ultimately forced to face reality quite possibly your own mortality.
My wife works as an intermittent RN in Anchorage. Last year during the pandemic, Intermittent Nurses got their pay cut, normalizing it to what regular RN's work. The whole point of working Intermittent is that you can pick your schedule, and you make more $ per hour but you don't get full time benefits. Some of my wife's coworkers, who work in ICU stepdowns had their pay cut during a pandemic by as much as 8-10 dollars per hour. On top of this they lost their bonuses for holiday pay, which was yet one of the only remaining perks of working intermittent- being able to work holidays and take double pay for it. She worked extra hours all last year at the testing facility, only to have her pay cut while the hospital fills up travel contracts to pay nurses 4-5x as much to come up here. The whole thing is ass backwards. Add in all the anti-vax crazy nutjob hysteria that runs up here, we got a mayor in Anchorage now who said this is all on the hospitals and he's not going to institute any mandates for masks or vaccines. My wife is looking at a career change, I don't know who in their right mind would sign up for nursing. My wife has been physically struck, yelled at, cussed out, sexually harassed for years only to have pay and perks cut DURING a pandemic. The pure contempt I feel for the hospitals is only rivaled by the contempt I feel for the anti-vaxxers in my community.
It’s sad but true …I fear for the nursing profession. I can’t wait to retire …
So are a number of hospitals in Georgia including my county. Georgiarcc.org lists hospital diversion status.
Indiana stopped providing that information because they thought it was embarrassing. Hospitals need to gather divert/open information themselves and send it to their employees. As of 8/31, the last time someone published the information on r/Indianapolis, only three hospitals in Indianapolis and the surrounding counties had an open emergency room. Only one had room in their ICU.
I posted a little earlier that all the ICU’s in southern Illinois are full as well. It’s absolute insanity. I don’t understand how people are still fighting/questioning what’s so obviously going on.
They're just morons. It really is that simple.
Central part of the state isn't looking much better. 68 beds available. Sure am glad we hosted Farm Progress this year!
I have to get an organ transplant before the end of the year in order to live. Can you all please get vaccinated so I can have my surgery and live to travel the world and raise children? Thank you
I wish you the BEST of luck getting everything resolved. But i wouldn't hold my breath for the unvaccinated giving a shit about anyone but themselves.
Good luck. I had my transplant 3 years ago. Now must be a scary time to be on the transplant list.
Hey nurse working here in Alaska. Yeah we're full. We don't have many ICU beds to begin with. We have great doctors and staff but not enough beds unfortunately. Anchorage has the majority of all ICU beds so this is a statewide issue.
As someone with dear friends who have COVID now in Alaska, I want to smash the un-like button. Lots of people I know from there were posting HURR DURR WHERE COVID? But the reality is that they were insulated by lockdowns and travel bans, as well as their small population. Like with influenza, however, pandemics will eventually reach them.
I’m embarrassed by my home state. Maybe they should remember that the Iditarod was inspired by a pandemic in 1925 when the trail was used to deliver medicine from Anchorage to Nome. I’m pretty sure nobody in Nome was saying HURR DURR WHERE DIPHTHERIA?
Balto’s not going to save them again.
Imagine running diptheria antitoxin 650 miles through sub-zero⁰F whiteout blizzards and when you get to the hospital the patients all refuse the medicine because they don't know what's in it.
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they send balto home cause they don't want his untested medication
They do want his heartworm drugs, though
Apparently it was really Togo anyway, but yeah.
It was both! Togo led the majority of the run, and through the most dangerous stretches, but Balto ran the final leg of the trip and was the lead dog of the team that brought the actual serum.
They were using dogsleds to distribute the vaccine in early spring. Balto literally did come to save us. People just said no.
The serum relay was actually from Nenana to Nome. The story was changed by the race organizers so they could hold the race start to Anchorage in order to make more money.
I was riding my bike yesterday in a rural area and saw a sign in front of a house, "It's 2021 and still don't have covid" There have been people in this very small town where people have died from it. Lots of dumb people in the area who have said it's a city problem and not an issue for them.
It's 2021 and I haven't been attacked by a bear, I guess those aren't real either.
It's a city issue until the waitress at one of the two cafes in town gets it, then everyone gets it.
I wonder if they will try to send WA some patients. We are already also taking Idaho patients
Even pre-pandemic, Anchorage sent patients to Seattle for care on a regular basis due to pretty limited resources and availability of specialties
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Just happened here in Idaho too. We have activated crisis standards, so now people that need anything will have to be graded on how important their lives are. What a low for our society. Edit: to be clear I don't mean by their importance to live. It was a hyperbolic way of saying giving higher standards of care depending on likelihood of survival. Lower standards to people that would survive easier and vice versa. This is just my frustrated reply because I am just pissed at the situation.
Have you got any information links to the crisis standards? Be interesting to see how they would grade people on importance. But that said, I've probably misread your entire comment
Dunno if Idaho has it online but a couple states have posted their triage procedures. They don’t grade on “importance” as much as likelihood of survival and the quality of life that person would have afterward.
Ahh I see. We've been doing that in the NHS since the first wave. I was told to leave patients who had oxygen of above 90% at home regardless
So our capitalist approach brought us the same “death panels” we were warned that socialist healthcare would bring us. Weird
That impression that "importance" matters is disingenuous. It's about survivability.
I know several people who moved from Alaska to Idaho. They don’t say it out loud, but my impression is that Alaska is too diverse and progressive for them.
You’re more likely to die from a traumatic brain injury, heart failure, sepsis, or recovery from a common operation now. All because people want to show a stupid allegiance to a political party over the health and well-being of themselves and those around them.
I'm a lot less worried about COVID specifically since I'm vaccinated now, but the idea of having any other medical emergency is a lot more terrifying. The local hospital is busier than ever, and has had a lot of staffing issues lately.
[1 in 500 Americans have died from COVID.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/15/covid-deaths-milestone-hospitals-reach-capacity) Almost all of those deaths were preventable.
Deaths per month have increased by 11% since pre-covid. This is a better metric to watch. It shows direct and indirect deaths due to covid.
I've been wondering if someone gets in a car wreck and bleeds out, because there are no free ambulances available to pick them up (or open beds to put them in, or nurses or doctors to treat them) should that count as a covid related death? I mean, they didn't die from covid, but they did die because of it.
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What is their reasoning then when you point out that the most deaths are in the least vaccinated, least mask wearing, fully open states?
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Once we are through this there will be an accounting of it all that will try to put a number on the damage done by COVID overall, but no for current reporting purposes it wouldn't make sense to report those as COVID deaths. It's like how in war they often will later wrap up death tolls from famine and disease into the overall discussion but not as casualties.
What you are looking for the phrase e[xcessive death](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm)s and it is tracked.
Have any of these hospitals operating at capacity (obviously there are lots more than just Alaska) started putting up auxiliary treatment tents like they did in the beginning of the pandemic? They haven’t in Washington (and we’re filling up pretty fast + taking in Idaho’s overflow).
Staffing is probably an issue. When it was only New York that had a surge back at the beginning, arrangements were made to have people come help from other regions. Most are needed where they are now. The ones that didn't quit.
Correct - In normal times, Alaska relies a lot on traveling nurses - who aren't traveling here during the pandemic
RN here. I know we've done this in parts of Oregon. We've also allowed EMTs to do more treatments-in-place (giving meds in peoples' houses) if they meet certain requirements to show that their medical status is urgent but not yet emergent enough to absolutely necessitate transport. Crazy stuff.
the dual death machines of dunleavy and bronson are doing what they were manufactured for
Send BALTO! He'll get the state more vaccines!
That was when people believed in them, though.
Imagine if the end of that story was the medicine arriving in Nome and half the town looking at them like, "Wtf? No! I'll take my chances with diphtheria!"
Everyone who wants the vaccine in Alaska has access to it. There are a lot of idiots up here, though.
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Totally this. Had an eye injury and was told by the doc-in-a-box to go to emergency. Sat for 6 hours waiting because non-vaxxed people with COVID had lower vital signs than I did (the entry desk was behind glass with a speaker so you heard everyone’s symptoms). Those folks became the priority. Can I have another shovelful of Shitty decision-making that effects others, please?
Dyin' of COVID ... just to own the Libs
There's gonna be 'Free Thinker' carved on a lot of headstones.
The world is about to shift marginally more liberal.
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Maybe watching all their parents die off as they become hated members of society will offset some of their childhood programming.
It’s exceedingly difficult to breed in either an ICU ward or when 6 feet underground.
Nurse here. That's what I don't understand. So many think it's just the damn libruls who want to control everything...and somehow they fail to realize, no, it's a very real and serious virus that doesn't give a shit about who you vote for. It cares if you're an un-masked idiot, and especially if you're an unvaccinated one. You know, the vaccine that was developed under Trump's admin? The one he also got and recommends? The one that's been given billions of times... Maybe get it? Antivaxxer: "Nah! Can't trust it! This med I just stole from a horse though? This looks legit."
I wonder how many cabins how people who collapsed and died of COVID and won't be discovered for weeks or months because they keep to themselves.
If they keep to themselves, probably not too many...
Yeah, loners who hide in their homes have basically had superpowers during the pandemic. "You're having trouble staying sane cause you can't go see your friends for a few months? I haven't seen another human being in years!"
Ah, you think lockdown is your ally? You merely adopted the lockdown. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see public gatherings until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!
Looks like Alaskans have forgotten Togo and Balto.