From what I’ve read, a lot of nurses have quit due to overwork. It feels like by trying to help too many people, hospitals put themselves on a path to actually help fewer people due to staff attrition.
It doesn’t seem sustainable at all. Hospital administrators in heavily impacted areas really need to do some serious long-term planning and make some hard decisions. Save a certain number of beds for non-covid cases and put a hard cap on the rest of their capacity that doesn’t include putting patients in hallways, conference rooms, and tents if you can’t staff them without requiring nurses and doctors to work endless crazy overtime that leads to them quitting.
Hospital administration is less about providing great care and being altruistic and more about turning a profit.
When the pandemic started, hospitals and physicians weren’t able to treat and do normal regular care. They lost a lot of money that they are trying to recoup.
Or avoiding or minimizing losses, which is basically the same motivation.
Even the most charitable organizations with ongoing missions want to avoid going bankrupt, because that would obviously prevent them from doing their charitable mission.
Surely nothing could possibly go wrong with this situation . . .
When Idaho public health officials announced this week that northern hospitals were so crowded with coronavirus patients that they would be allowed to ration health care, roughly 11,000 kids in Coeur d’Alene were packing lunches, climbing on buses or grabbing backpacks for their first day of school.
Very few of them — maybe 2% or 3%, based on one district spokesman’s estimate — were wearing masks.
Wow, this is what I mean. People just get nasty when it comes to vaccines. I think people who get so worked up about the vaccines are just as political as the antivaxxers. On the opposite side of politics but no less political. I can hear a storm of righteous lecture brewing at this point. Yawn
Actually, my train of thought came from my dog’s medication after he got some serious operation. His medication was basically the same as what my daughter got after pulling wisdom teeth out. On the surface of it. In the names of drugs. Probably not the dosage and there could be differences not reflected in the name. But it didn’t look that big a deal. Animal feed, on the other hand is a different matter. I wouldn’t want to eat that.
There may be inactive ingredients in animal medication that are not in human medication. Maybe a better way to say it is that we shouldn’t take medication that is made for animals. Regardless, it’s hypocritical and completely irrational to say no to a vaccine because “the guvmint!” or “big pharma!” or “untested!” and then take something made by Merck that is not approved for Covid and may even be made for livestock.
Although it easily becomes political because it comes down a typical political conflict between:
“My rights and freedoms to do whatever I want” (i.e. not get vaccinated), versus
“My rights and freedoms from harms imposed on me by others” (i.e. unvaccinated people spreading dangerous diseases)
Many rules in various societies, and the politics of what those rules should be, are based on how conflicts of these types are handled. Even ancient societies had rules like “you shall not murder” and “you shall not steal”, because murder and theft imposed involuntary harms on others.
I get your overall point, but I don’t consider laws against murder and theft to be political, either. At least not the way the term is being used here.
Carelessly spreading a dangerous virus that kills someone could be construed by some as an avoidable homicide, while others may view doing so to be in their rights. Although an avoidable careless homicide, if it is a crime in that situation, is a lower level crime than murder, the conflict of rights as seen by different people still exists and can become political, particularly when government rules on behavior to limit things like virus spread are considered or implemented.
You seem to be far afield here. So far as I know, no one has been charged with any level of homicide for refusing to be vaccinated, nor am I advocating for that. And we need not reexamine the social contract to understand that governments regularly and reasonably regulate behavior in order to limit the spread of a dangerous disease and protect the lives of others.
But all this is beside the point. The behavior is reckless, selfish, dangerous and despicable regardless of political party, and whether the behavior is regulated or not.
Whether you agree with the vaccine mandate or not there is some hypocrisy within this mandate. Why are illegal immigrants at the southern border excused of the mandate. Being sympathetic to the plight of wanting them to stay here and not be sent back but then not mandate the same rules that you are expecting of American citizens is extremely hypocritical in itself. Either we are going for mass vaccination or not. This kind of ruling is what, in my opinion, is contributing to the complete mistrust of our government.
The confusion stemmed from the Postal Service’s relationship with the federal government. The Postal Service is an independent agency in the executive branch that is not subject to the president’s executive orders. That means Biden’s order requiring all federal employees to be vaccinated would not apply to the Postal Service.
However, the Postal Service is subject to regulations from the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA will be issuing a regulation under Biden’s plan that will require workers at all companies with 100 or more employees to be vaccinated or submit to weekly testing. That regulation will apply to the Postal Service, which has about 650,000 employees.
Seems they’ll get a reprieve until those regulations actually take effect and of course subject to any lawsuits filed. I’m sure there will be a few.
If they’re government employees or working for a company with over 100 people, or any of the other requirements then they certainly are subject to the mandate.
There is no “excuse” or exemption for illegal immigrants.