It’s only 11:00 in the morning, but Okinawa Prefecture is already reporting a provisional figure of at least 600 new cases today, which is a huge increase over yesterday’s 225.
I expect that the government will impose new restrictions soon.
ETA: The final figure for Okinawa was 623. Tokyo reported 390, which is also a huge increase over yesterday’s 151.
This is some scary logic: But now, the UK has announced more than 200,000 new cases in a day for the first time in the entire pandemic and Omicron is the dominant variant - so airlines can argue that there is no longer any hope of relying on testing to “keep out Omicron”.
This is worth reading.
That’s horrible, and yet I wouldn’t be too hard on them. Look at the choices they face: allow covid positive, vaccinated and masked staff to care for patients, or have staffing stretched so thinly as to be essentially “sorry, man, you are on your own.” Like I have said repeatedly through this, there are a few choices, and they are all wrong. And, before someone suggests they bring in additional staffing, let’s be clear. There are none to be had. This is what a broken healthcare system looks like.
Tracks with what we are seeing. Shit.
Tucker’s mouth:
I’m unclear why they didn’t mobilize the National Guard to set up field hospitals and bring in the Navy’s hospital ships to overwhelmed areas as they did early on in the pandemic. Here’s what was going on in 2020:
And here we are now:
The National Guard is providing some help, but they’re currently not setting up the field hospitals with hundreds of beds like they did last time.
Not privy to the inner workings, but given the reported issues on other Navy ships, covid could be an issue with there. No clue on the field hospitals, though. Good questions. The cynic in me is thinking “But if they do that, every overwhelmed hospital system will want one!” And, well, yes!
Broken indeed.
The wife’s hospital has redistributed the nurses from the now-shuttered elective surgery units to act as phlebotomists, since they’re either ill or have quit. And even though phlebotomists are usually the least experienced in the hospital and in so theory the most easily refillable technical staff, they have a high turnover rate because of abuse from patients.
The surge in sick patients also means that their lab is running out of test reagents for the machines, meaning the overwhelmed staff has had to switch to doing tests by hand. Exhausted people make mistakes already, now add in the extra work load and it’s going to get a lot uglier.
Field hospitals the first time around went unused. In Michigan we had two set up in two very large convention centers in metro Detroit. They went unused and are used to mock the governor.
But when you point out they didn’t need to be used because early on the stay home, mask mandates, capacity limits, etc… worked you get lectured about communism.
With none of the mitigation in place we sure could use some extra hospital beds at least for patients that require non ICU care.
Elina Petersen et al. (2022), Multi-organ assessment in mainly non-hospitalised individuals after SARS-CoV-2 infection: The Hamburg City Health Study COVID program. Eur. Heart J.
Not yet up on the journal, so if you see a DOI and get a 404 there, no worries. The city of Hamburg has a copy online already.
Conclusion from the study:
Subjects who apparently recovered from mild to moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection show signs of subclinical multi-
organ affection related to pulmonary, cardiac, thrombotic, and renal function without signs of structural brain damage,
neurocognitive, or quality-of-life impairment. Respective screening may guide further patient management.
Just FTR, they didn’t find evidence for brain damage. Hey, I’m trying to see the positive side, ok? … OK, not even sure if /s…<\small>
WTF is wrong with people? Do not be rude to others in general, but definitely not to anyone who will be:
Really seems like a no-brainer. Prior to this pandemic, I had no idea of the abuse medical staff have to put up with.
My mom briefly worked as a phlebotomist many years ago. She said she really got sick of how many bad jokes she heard about how she was a vampire.
A little light in the middle of the tunnel.
Oh no, we’re about to hit 5000 entries!
Stay home everyone!
