But aren’t wealthy people much more able to shop and travel to regions where the waiting lists are shorter?
Well. I guess we can agree to disagree. That’s what I love about our country. We have the freedom to have our own opinions. I certainly hope we don’t run into a situation where an unvaccinated POC arrives at the hospital at the same time as a middle class vaccinated white person and they choose to treat the middle class white person because he/she is vaccinated. I’m sure when the POC family cries racism you will happily say it was the right choice because of vaccination status.
I’ll leave the triaging to the medical personnel. It’s like “Sophies Choice”. No good options. Have a great holiday weekend.
On this same topic:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/us/covid-treatment-ecmo.amp.html
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Yeah, well, I am never going to to argue that the wealthy don’t find a way. Money always finds a way to work any system. Never going to eradicate that fundamental truth. Cheaters gonna cheat. Especially when life is on the line. I think that is ultimately the point of OP’s original post.
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I understand triage and rationing and I don’t think anyone should be denied service or be put further down the line because of their lifestyle choices.
However, we can have a discussion about hypocrisy and lying and pulling strings to jump the line. What they did isn’t illegal, but we can certainly talk about the ethics of it. And maybe we can remove some loopholes and make things more equitable.
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FWIW, you could swap the POC/“middle class white” in your sentence and I’d feel the same way. Around where I live, most who are unvaxxed are white (semi-rural and not a very diverse area). Some of my relatives are unvaxxed too (all white). DIL’s relatives are all vaxxed (POC). To me, it doesn’t make a difference. If there are shortages and it’s Covid related, treat the vaxxed first.
Also, make sure beds are available for the non-Covid related emergencies like the Houston case. A 30 minute “fix” that is practically guaranteed to work shouldn’t be taking the life of an innocent man due to beds being full in an entire metro area with Covid unvaxxed.
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There was a news story a few weeks ago about a 17 year old football player who came down with covid. While he was being treated, his mother said they kept asking her if he was vaccinated (no) and she said that was a conversation for after he recovered but she didn’t want to keep hearing how he should have been vaccinated.
I don’t think the hospital people were scolding her for not having him vaccinated, but were actually saying there was nothing they could do. She was hearing they weren’t treating him because he wasn’t vaccinated but they were saying there was nothing they could do to help him. He died.
He wasn’t moved to the back of the line, there just simply isn’t a lot they can do for some patients. If those who are vaccinated get treatment faster or get to use the more advanced vents or ECMO, that’s because in triage those are the patients most likely to recover with treatment, not because they are more deserving.
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Why oh why is race introduced into this topic? It is about vax status, not race. Shots are freely available to all regardless of race. Not everything is about race.
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It seems the difference in Covid situation is that people who did not get vaccinated (if medically
advisable) were implying that they were not afraid of the consequences
I’m not really that concerned about rationing of medical care. Although I do wonder if staff asked if a very sick patient was vaccinated because they could better predict the outcome if the patient was vaccinated. Meaning that even if sick and hospitalized, that in their experience, very very few young healthy patients actually died. When not vaccinated, the outcome can be very different.
I really don’t understand why people jump to all these conclusions about why medical personnel is asking questions. A patients vaccinated status is pretty important to the outcome. Even if the medical staff is questioning and making judgement, maybe it’s because they know how preventable this is.
But the original post was about a family lying and cheating to get extraordinary treatment. And I guess getting the insurance company to pay for the transport of the patient. Very different situation. And I personally hope that the insurance company can decide not to pay for the transport if the family did indeed lie about vaccination status.
I also don’t know if this is still the case but the Facebook posts indicated that even if this man pulled through, he would have to receive a double lung transplant. Oh boy, that’s a tough hill to climb and I hope the patient is thankful of all his family has gone through to save him. Because his life is forever changed and he will have a lot of challenges in his future. But that’s my opinion of knowing the work and pain of transplants. It’s not the rosy picture that you think of always.
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It seems to be human nature to jump to conclusions when one does not have full information or enough understanding about the situation or reasons.
A transplant recipient typically needs immune suppression to avoid rejecting the transplant. That can make any vaccination in the future ineffective.
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I really hope he pulls through and that all friends and family will get vaccinated. No matter his outcome after this, he will need to be surrounded by protection from this virus. And they need to be told survival does not mean long-term immunity. Not only will his immunity wane but he will not be protected from any variant.
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Sorry, that is incredibly naive. Such ‘happy endings’ will NEVER be available to all, and are not in any country on earth.
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If he does end up with a transplant, he and his wife will have to do a complete reversal: going from anti-vax, anti-mask, no precautions to requiring everyone around him be vaxxed and masked with strong precautions. I wonder how they’ll handle the cognitive dissonance?
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It will be interesting if organ transplant rules will be/have been changed to reflect the new reality of Covid and vaccinations.
For instance, liver transplant candidates need to keep sober for a period of time to be put on a transplant list. At least this is what I’ve been told.
That’s why David Crosby and Mickey Mantle received them, they were sober for a time before they could receive a donated liver.
One of the tenets of organ transplantation is the ability to be able to follow the rules of keeping the organ you were gifted.
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A cautionary message for those who are jumping the line to get boosters. Follow the science not the politicians.
You need a license to practice medicine you only need a pulse to be a politician.
Conspicuous news drop for something so substantive across multiple sources for a late Friday before a holiday weekend.
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Just to add some specificity, you’re really saying “follow the US science”. The science from Israel supports getting boosters.
US science has lagged before. The biggest one in recent memory being the major delay recommending masks back in early 2020 even though asian doctors had been recommending masks well ahead of the US.
To be clear, I support the CDC. But they made major missteps with the initial covid response (testing kits, anyone?) and some of the bloom is off the rose, in my eyes.
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How is that all that relevant though? If you have a finite resource, and demand is too high, that is a huge problem.
When a hospital states how many available beds they have, that is and has always been completely contingent on the staffing they have.
In my experience in hospital nursing, there has been a disturbing trend of hospitals simply being unwilling to hire enough staff. They have been stressing nurses for over 2 decades, pushing them to take more and more patients. Pre-Covid, many nurses were already at their max with regard to how they were able to cope with the loads being assigned to them while retaining the ability to provide quality care. When Covid began inundating hospitals with patients, there was really no way for existing staff to step up and do more without compromising patient safety and staff sanity because they were already pushed to (or in some cases, beyond) their limits. Not only do they need more nurses, they need more EXPERIENCED nurses. Just putting more licensed bodies in place is not the answer-they need expertise on the floors and units, and too many of those experienced providers were already gone when Covid came on scene.
I got out of ICU nursing because I could read the writing on the wall-they were taking well established (i.e. safe) nurse to patient ratios and pressuring charge nurses into violating those ratios- not because data showed that nurses weren’t busy enough with those ratios, but simply because they wanted to save $$$. And they saved $$$ by NOT hiring adequate staff. Now they are reaping what they have sown.
When I was working ICU, they started pressuring us to take a 3rd patient, rationalizing it by saying the 3rd patient couldn’t be a vent patient. 2 ICU patients can still be a brutal load, depending. My days on that unit required a constant effort to control inner panic; the reality that at any time I could make a mistake that could kill someone, all because the powers that be didn’t want to pay an extra nurse, was not only infuriating, but terrifying and soul-killing. To this day I still have nightmares about being at work and not being able to handle my assignment. I’ll realize I missed a whole page of meds, or I’m trying desperately to prepare meds for a patient but the call bells keep going off, or I realize when my shift is over that I didn’t even know I had an extra patient and had never even laid eyes on him all day. It’s always such a relief to wake up.
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I can’t even imagine. But thank you for taking care of the patients while you were there. Just know you helped a lot of people. I would have wanted to have had you as my nurse (but hopefully will never be put in that situation)!
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