There are ICU wards FILLED with COVID patients on ventilators who would tell you it is anything but “mild”.
Anecdotally, the people I know who have gotten it (tested as positive) did not go to the hospital and none died but all said it was one of the worst “flu-like” experience they have ever had.
I know there are some with mild symptoms and some who never have symptoms.
But it remains the ICU wards are full of sick people gasping for breath. 5x more Americans have died from it than died in 20 years in Vietnam. And they are most certainly not all really old people.
Yes but you’re asking it in a vacuum. There are 3 vaccines that are less than 2 weeks from use.
Not entirely true but a reasoned concern absent a vaccine.
Part, not all of the problem is a potential lack of specific ICU units. That is not a personnel shortage but a protocol shortage. We saw this with the hospital ship. It was sent to relieve non-covid patients but NY wanted it for covid patients so they reconfigured the ship.
But yes, we could overrun the number of personnel needed. We still have military medical staff that can be used (and were in NYC). I would be concerned about that if we weren’t getting vaccines shortly.
I most certainly am not, and I am absolutely well aware of the imminent vaccines. We are two weeks (hopefully) from the vaccines beginning to be administered. This does not mean that there will be a magic light switch being flipped in the latter half of December, and things will suddenly get better.
As I already noted to you, even though the first recipients of the vaccine are going to be those in assisted living facilities (and critical healthcare providers), they will not all be suddenly vaccinated and immune in two weeks.
It’s going to take a number of weeks (maybe even a couple of months) to get those populations vaccinated
All three of the initial vaccination formulae require two doses, given three to four weeks apart
My understanding is that immunity still takes several weeks to develop, even after the second dose
In the meantime, cases (and hospitalizations, and deaths) are going to continue to grow, rapidly, over the next couple of months. The widespread travel and family gatherings last weekend mean that the die has been cast – as bad as the numbers are now, they are going to be substantially worse by the end of December.
And, those first rounds of vaccinations don’t address the people who are at significantly higher risk for complications, and death, due to age or co-morbidities, but who aren’t in assisted living. They probably aren’t going to be getting vaccinated until late winter or spring, and they are still going to be getting sick in the meantime.
Don’t get me wrong – the news about vaccines is amazing, and I think we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. The issue is that the next couple of months, before all of the most vulnerable can get inoculated, are very likely to be a nightmare.
why do you think it will take months to vaccinate people in nursing homes? Are they hard to pin down?
As to immunity here is what Pfizer says: How long does it take for immunity to develop fully after vaccination?
The trial began assessing immunity seven days after the second shot. We know that protective immunity builds up within four weeks of the first dose, but Sahin says that it appears to develop earlier than that. Further details will be published in a matter of days, he says.
So the second dose appears to reinforce the first dose.
There are ~3 million people living in ~50,000 assisted care and residential facilities across the U.S., so it’s, in part, an issue of them being spread out and decentralized. The government is working with Walgreens and CVS to administer the vaccine to nursing home residents, as well as the workers at those facilities.
In addition, it’s not yet clear exactly when enough vaccines will be available to complete the program. As per this Washington Post article from yesterday:
So, yes, really, it’s probably going to take months.
We have 45 nursing homes in my county. There’s literally no reason why they all can’t be vacinated within a few days. you take the total number of people and divide that by the number that can be processed in a day. That’s how many medical people are needed to work a double shift. Done.
The people who are actually in charge of doing this, and who are actually looking at the full logistics of it, are saying it’s going to take up to three months. It appears that a major factor is uncertainty in how many does that they will have access to, and when.
I certainly hope it won’t take three months, but I do place at least some weight on the assessments of the people who are having to actually get it done.
Yes, we know how it spreads. But it doesn’t blow in on Monday with a warning whistle. It’s constantly moving because there is no way of locking everything down. This has been the problem from day one. If there’s no way of locking everything down then masks have limited effect over time.
The more mobile a population the more it’s going to move around. It hasn’t hit the US as a unified event. It’s popped up from place to place just as it’s doing in places like Germany, the UK, and the US. Given the size of the US we’re a mirror of Europe in how it’s spread.
So while I don’t discount effective use of masks over time the best use of money is to focus on the vulnerable which is exactly what we’re going to do with the vaccine. I think the hierarchy of distribution reflects what I’ve been saying.
I’m trying to point out that financial damage isn’t sustainable. I think it was Paul Volcker who said “, in the long term we’re dead”. Which means you also have to plan for the short term.
Mitigation efforts that cause economic harm will deteriorate over time because it’s based on social behavior.
We’ve been getting some mixed and even contradictory messages about that. We were first told masks weren’t necessary. But later we were told they lied to keep supplying the limited number of masks to health care workers. But Fauci took his mask off when he thought the cameras were off. Biden lowered his mask to cough. Chicago spent $6 million to set up McCormick Place convention center as a hospital. I don’t know if anyone was sent there, and they dismantled it. A Navy hospital ship was sent to New York. COVID cases were sent to nursing homes instead.
If things are as bad as you say, the media has every incentive to plaster it all over the place just to hit Trump with it. But they haven’t. The first guess is that the situation really isn’t that bad yet. It’s bad, and it could get a lot worse, and we must do whatever we can to prevent it.
Those 3 million or so who Magiver feels are the target population who we will save by circling freezer trucks full of vaccine around nursing homes represent perhaps 15% of the US population aged 75 years or older.
The other 85% over 75 years remain vulnerable. There are not enough aircraft in the USA to airlift them to the vanishing number of vacant ICU beds dotted around the countryside. Unless you want to send in your National Guard troops to protect Millicent Chudley at 53 Green Street, Crapton, she will remain vulnerable and at high risk until the vaccination is distributed and effective across the general population.
With increased cases caused by Thanksgiving likely to be amplified by Christmas travel, its hard to see how the US hospital system will not hit capacity by late December.
Not to underscore the seriousness of the current situation we’ve had the same discussion about Florida and how doomed that state was. Florida is now way down the list compared to other states. There is a repeating pattern of rise and fall within parts of the country. it’s not a unified event.
We have 25 states with heard immunity above 30% and medical treatment improves with each day going forward. A lot has changed since March and we shouldn’t view it as if the same conditions existed.
I gather from other posts here that Florida is suspected of deliberate under-quoting of its figures. Maybe, maybe not, but what is the pattern if Florida is omitted?
The field hospitals in your link are Field Hospitals, essentially segregated beds - not ICU beds. And even if they were, one of the persistent messages we hear is that medical staff are already worked to exhaustion. One state even wanted covid-infected staff to keep working! The lack of specialist trained medical staff is as critical as ICU capacity, and not able to be conjured up by airfreight from elsewhere.
And, as you’ve been asked several times, how’s the airlift going in those states that are hitting critical right now?
You tell me. You’re asking a non-question. I haven’t seen our airlift system taxed in the slightest in my state. You can literally watch them flying on Flight Aware if you’re bored.
And as has been pointed out we sent a hospital ship to NYC. There’s no reason we can do the same with field hospitals. Covid medical treatment generally doesn’t involve surgery. It’s basic care and support with drugs and ventilators if needed. There’s no high-tech magic involved.
It’s a pandemic. Left to do its own thing with no mitigation efforts there is a good chance the vast majority of Americans would be exposed to the virus (with varying reactions).
Define “bad” in your view?
In the OP I mentioned Vietnam which caused a great outcry at the deaths and, currently, we have 5x as many COVID deaths…in less than one year. Pearl Harbor had 2,300 deaths. 9/11 had ~3,000 deaths. We are doing that daily now.