The other current pain we are going through is the number of health care workers catching it. While losing some of them is devastating at both the personal level and systematically, those that survive will hopefully have immunity for future waves. While PPE should still be used, I imagine it will be reassuring for them to have immunity and less risk of carrying it home to their families.
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We are Sept. 13-20 in rented points at AKL with savannah views! My first Deluxe
We began planning this trip last October. I’m so disappointed.
Seems like we’re burning through resources now, some of them irreplaceable, that building up resources for a second wave may be more of a theory than practice.
The machines that make PPE and ventilators are being pushed well past their normal duty cycle and will begin to fail. The people that staff those factories, including skilled trades like machinists and mechanics, are going to get sick and incapacitated in some number. The trucks that deliver all this equipment are getting pushed harder, and the truck drivers and distribution workers are going to get sick in some number.
Plus we’re killing off our doctors, nurses, hospital staff, EMTs, police, and fire at an alarming rate, and giving 90% of those left weapons-grade PTSD. Shake every tree and look under every rock and you’re not going to get enough retired and recently graduated people to replace them.
This may all be moot because I believe we’re past the tipping point of having to go through the herd immunity/burn-it-out scenario. Flattening the curve isn’t only about not overwhelming hospital capacity. It’s about limiting community spread, so that the number of contagious people goes down, and the community spread with it. It was never meant to mean the same number of people get it, just spread out over time.
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From what I have read, it IS meant to have the same number of people have it, but spread out over time, unless of course a vaccine shows up.
I live in a county that has numerous factories and warehouses that provide goods for the East coast and internationally. My DH works at one of them and has been a maintenance mechanic for a number of years. Machine operators are not “skilled” workers in this area and can be trained without experience. There are many people in this area that are still going out to work at these factories and warehouses that are considered essential. Some people are going to these warehouses to work when being laid off from other jobs.
There are also other factories starting to make PPE and ventilators, such as Ford, that are just starting out with manufacturing some of these resources. As they get the hang of it, they expect to increase their output.
I’m not saying that everything would be perfect, but I hardly think that we are in a doomsday scenario here.
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I agree. And it’s working IMO.
I’m in Western NY and As of yesterday our county is 465 cases, with 77 of them being hospitalized across our four hospitals. I know that 40 of them are at my hospital. And when I checked yesterday, less than a third were on ventilators or in intensive care. The healthcare workers in my community are absolutely not feeling any kind of trauma like NYC. Frankly, we have more staff than we know what to do with. I have not worked my last two scheduled shifts, because as a Per diem worker they just don’t need me. All the nurses from units like pre-admission testing, day of surgical admission, operating room, recovery room, gastroenterology, and any other place you can think of that has an elective component are now cross training to the inpatient units. I last worked 10 days ago, and at one point during the day we had more staff members than patients. My 28 bed unit had only 12 patients when I got there and by the end of the shift they were only nine. (Five were discharged, including a Covid patient, and we had two admissions.)
Social distancing has kept the curve flattened, in this town.
My concern now is that we will be expected to continue the social distancing for months and months. While I am not at all interested in trading the economy for human lives, I do wonder just how far we can suppress the economy before it overwhelmingly takes over lives.
I don’t know enough about how things look in Florida. But I still hope to see travel opened by June 30. Not because I plan to travel, but the travel industry is going to implode. That’s a lot of jobs and families touched.
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Our county has 144 cases and 1 death. Now I am sure there are less severe cases around (I know of at least one presumed case), but I don’t think that is too bad. I certainly sympathize for that person’s family. Now our entire state is a different story. Of course that includes Philly, which has people with a lot of contact with NJ and NYC. Most cases and deaths are in Philly and the surrounding counties. I’m sure this is very distressing for that area of the state.
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I could have written your post, except we only have 194 cases and 7 deaths in our county in WA. We do have some Covid patients at my hospital (mostly on 2 floors and in the ICUs, and most not needing to be intubated), but we certainly are not struggling. We too have an excess of nurses for the same reason you do (and they too are being cross-trained). I went to work this morning for a 12 hour shift, but was sent home just 4.5 hours in because there are no labor patients, and no needs anywhere in the hospital. This is after we already had 2 RNs from L&D home low census, and another floated to our brand new “Labor float pool” to help on other units if needed (functional skills, as we are so specialized). The nurse doing that today never even got one call to help 4.5 hours in, she is getting paid to sit on L&D and do, well basically nothing. It is so hard to believe what is happening other places, and also that our peak is supposed to be around 1 week out. We seem to have flattened the curve significantly in our state, and have also taken all the revenue generating procedures out of the loop. It’s strange times in healthcare, that’s for sure!
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How big are the counties? I ask because my small city outside of Boston, as of last night, has 109 cases. I know that because our mayor called us with the numbers and let the residents know that the National Guard is responding in our city.
In Ohio, we have been well below the projected curve for our state for 6 days in a row now. In the last 24 hours, we only hit 47% of the expected curve for new cases.
Population around 522,000 over 1,764 square miles. What about your county?
We have 109 cases on April 3rd for 56k people in my city.
We have 2648 confirmed cases in our county. There are about 1.6 million people.
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Almost 450,000 people in my county. We get a lot of people that work from out of state and out of county coming and going on a regular basis.
742,474 (2018) For my county.
It’s great to hear numbers from your county, they look like a great sign!
A couple of days? weeks? ago you mentioned feeling hopeful because so many smart people around the world are working on this crisis, and that really resonated with me. I have started seeing this in my daily life - literally everyone I know that is able to do something to help is trying to.
We know so little about this thing that measures have to be heavy handed. We don’t know how much masks help protecting, how dangerous it is to just touch things (how long after does it become safe), how to treat it, when do you start/stop spreading it, the whole asymptomatic transmission thing is still partially a mystery, we are also pretty bad at testing it and there is no vaccine. But all of this is temporary, people will figure it out, and the more we know the more fine-grained measures can be taken and more of life can go back to normal.
There is also the whole political, trust in government to act correctly and access to resources side of things, which did made me comment less around here just because things vary so much between my reality and most of this forum.
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And Eagle County (where Vail is) has an huge number of cases per capita. They had someone on tv last week, talking about how the mountain towns are doing “ok” with all the tourists gone. But that they are still sending serious cases down to Denver. Probably will need to send some to Grand Junction, as Denver will be getting overloaded.
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Unfortunately for Floridians (and wdw fans), FL Governor making it worse
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I absolutely think it is wrong for government to interfere with a church’s ability to congregate, etc. It is a violation of the first amendment and sets a precedent that shouldn’t be tolerated.
I also think it is absolutely wrong for any church leadership to want to go ahead with public services during this time. In their freedom of religion, they should be choosing social distancing.
Our church has literally gone entirely on line. Services are online and being done from living ng rooms! Our youth groups are “meeting” virtually through Zoom.
I can’t believe churches are choosing to meet in person like this.
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Well said.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
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Our church is doing the same.
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