The day that Ontario finally announced that we’d start using a vaccine passport system for people to access non-essential services like restaurants, the number of people booking appointments for the vaccine doubled.
So they sold out their “deeply held beliefs” just so they could go to a bar.
Okay, fine, I’m glad the idiots are finally getting vaccinated, but goddamn, I’m going to hate these laggard plague rats for the rest of my life. Anyone who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing the right thing simply cannot be trusted ever again.
Life and death responsibility is always stressful.
One way to handle the stress is to tell yourself you have been through worse. Once COVID has become rare, and baring something that really is worse, like war, many medical professionals can look back on this and say they have seen worse.
Some will think I’m being facetious, but people really do have such thoughts.
That’s because the permanent staff person making $35/hour has costs above and beyond the $35/hour, and they’re not as easily disposed of temps when no longer needed, or a patient complains, or they get uppity, or just displease the hiring person in some vague manner.
I suspect in some cases it wasn’t a matter of deeply held beliefs so much as it wasn’t a priority for these folks when being unvaccinated didn’t inconvenience them.
My wife is a Nurse Practitioner. While her practice wasn’t, and isn’t, treating the COVID patients, some of her colleagues are – in the hospital.
But a secondary effect of COVID that many of us have heard about is the deferral of non-emergent care by patients unwilling to take the risk.
Like young people not participating in the insurance risk pool, reasonably healthy people deferring routine appointments, screening, and treatment for relatively minor issues did two things: it caused some issues to fester and become worse, and it increased the average acuity of the patients who did seek care.
In other words, only people who were either very concerned or – relatively – quite sick sought care. And the economic model at my wife’s clinic didn’t change – same number of patients per day, same number of minutes per appointment.
The MDs have also had to rely more on the mid-level practitioners (ie, NPs and Physician Assistants) to see some of their less acute patients (because they had/have to treat the inpatient COVID patients in the hospital), further increasing the average acuity that my wife and her peers see.
And our county’s ICU beds are currently at 100%.
Yeah. It’s been exhausting. I’m watching some of my wife’s colleagues – at all levels – age like they’re the POTUS.