Right? and on top of all that, Trump, cut funding for the response team that the obama administration had put together to deal with issues like this. We were able to successfully contain ebola for example, because of our preparedness and the willingness to take action at the first sign of trouble. And then they did not take it seriously when it hit China and they had to start ordering massive quarrentines there. That should have been our signal to ramp up all of this, so when it did hit, we’d be ready and could flatten the curve… South Korea had the right of it.
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Remember that special ed and obsolete definitions like “educable mentally retarded” have always been disproportionately skewed towards “Not White”. Eugenic sterilization - generally applied to perfectly healthy and competent adults - was officially practiced up until the 70s and was (you guessed it) mostly applied to Black and Native women.
This isn’t some high-minded intellectually rigorous triage. This is very thinly disguised genocide.
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Well some people were ready.
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Funny how some people with ‘built-in’ privilege always seem to forget about factoring in anything that doesn’t negatively affect them personally into the overall equation.
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It’s hard to believe we live in an era where Alabama, of all places, would deny life support to Republicans and other conservatives.
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Oh yes… they knew this was coming and did nothing for the rest of us to prepare our systems… this is the logical conclusion of the old Thatcherite view, there is not society.
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What did Wil JUST say…
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Yeah, I’m not happy about the guidelines, but when there isn’t enough medical support to save everyone, triage is just a fact. Doctors will be deciding who who will have a chance at living and who won’t, based on the uncomfortable facts of who’s most likely to survive, as well as other tough ethical judgement calls.
I’m wondering how Rob would write the triage rules? Because some people are going to die, thanks in no small part to the utterly criminal malfeasance of our national leadership.
So it’s an extreme oversimplification of a real world problem, as seen by tech bros who have no experience with the real world?
I tend to agree.
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We honestly should have been preparing for this at the federal level so that places like Alabama, with a long history of active discrimination couldn’t not be responsible for making these sorts of choices. If the proper preparation had been done ahead of time and if our federal government had taken this seriously MONTHS AGO, AS THEY SHOULD HAVE Alabama would not be making these sorts of directives, because they would not have to.
These are the kinds (pandemics, natural hazards, etc)of things that we as individuals can’t deal with effectively on our own. This is the point of the article up thread, that we create these large scale institutions so that we can mitigate events like this and save lives.
@beschizza is a fantastic dude,but I suspect he’s well aware that he’s not in a position to make such directives, so I’m unsure why you expect him (or me, or you, or anyone here who has not dealt with a pandemic on that end of things first hand) to give you a coherent policy.
Given the fact that other countries have responded and mitigated, we could have done so. We decided not to do so. Other countries have not been actively dismantling their welfare and regulatory systems for decades. We (meaning Americans) have time and again, actively voted for deregulation. This is not something that “just happened out of nowhere”. People have been aware that something like this could and will happen, and that we needed to be prepared. WE as a country ignored that and elected people who did the opposite.
So now Alabama’s right wing government can make life and death decisions that will dis proportionally impact the working class and especially people of color.
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Yeah, that is something I’m not down with. But that’s not written in to the triage rules, is it? Are any of the categories Rob quoted are disproportionate to minorities? I’m inclined to say “no” but don’t know for sure.,
If your point is that Alabama will disproportionately refuse treatment to minorities and the poor, I’d have to agree. But I’m not necessarily seeing that written in dog whistle in the triage rule any more than the CDC rules say or even hint that rich people, politicians and athletes will get priority for COVID-19 testing, yet they do get priority testing. And it is the written triage rules Rob is objecting to.
Do you trust the government of alabama, which is retrograde at the best of times on issues of race and class, to be making these decisions in this current environment? And unlike here in my state, there is no larger counterweight to these worse impulses like we have with Atlanta and the rest of GA.
These always impact the most marginalized communities. Always. The elite have alternatives, while the marginalized do not. You will see the upper class, white Alabamans able to access a level of care that people across the black belt can not access, meaning vulnerable communities there will be the first to be denied care.
I don’t think it’s a huge leap to see that it’s going to play out that way, because it always does. Just look at Katrina, for example. The communities that ended up stuck on their roofs, on overpasses stuck in the sun, and in the superdome were largely from the black working classes. Actually segregation was in lived memory and those structures were never really dismantled. They can very quickly arise again in cases such as these.
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Not my question. I’m asking if it is inherent in the rules as written, not whether the Alabama state government is trustworthy in terms of protecting the poor and minorities as it is not, no matter how the rules are written. But Rob is taking issue with how the rules are written, so that is specifically what I’m asking about.
We are talking cross purposes, I think. Since you want to talk about whether we can trust Alabama - we can’t - and I want to talk about whether the rules as written inherently target the poor or minorities, or how Rob would write them.
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I was a PICU doc for 3 years. You just described about 90% of my patients. And their survival rate was amazingly good. But not good enough that I could keep doing it. And this was before forced triage.
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Do you think that’s what matters though, or does implementation matter? I’d argue that it’s implementation that is critical.
Another example is looking at how Alabama treats their prison population, despite laws and federal regulation about such things.
As I said above, this is not an intellectual exercise, this is policy meeting reality. And we have to understand reality.
I get that, but these still have to be implemented, right?
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You make an excellent point and removes a large amount of the suspicion, but still, this is Alabama we’re talking about.
On that point, I think it’s wonderful she found something that she could not lie about (big butts).
People might want to keep in mind how often “lower IQ” and “mental retardation” were weaponized against black people. The Bell Curve still has its adherents today. Guess who is going to be more quickly “triaged” into those categories?
This is an ableist, racist combo of wrong.
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It’s too late in some places already. Those discussions needed to start back when this was supposed to be “a little flu.” We could do the math and knew what was coming. But to act on that would make it real, and scary, so we didn’t. Now we are really and truly fucked.
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Right, but if the issue is that Alabama will discriminate no matter what then it isn’t the written rules that matter at all and Rob’s OP about the written rules is moot.
So that maybe we can hold someone accountable for this later, at the very least. Or we can get ahead of this prior to the NEXT pandemic… or so we can ramp up production of what we need to save lives NOW going forward?
Look, I would LOVE to not be here. But we are. And we need to point this stuff out actively and head it off as best we can now that we’re in this situation.
We have to be critical in situations like this, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW WE PREVENT IT IN THE FUTURE…
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