We never spiked as high as some areas around the country, but we aren’t falling either. The rest of the state has. And our areas hospitals are still diverting.
My guy’s hospital is still quite full though it isn’t all Covid. Part of it is people who waited to get medical care out of fear or because of Covid delay. One lady (we know) is getting surgery soon and was told she’ll be in the basement in a makeshift room afterward. She was worried they wouldn’t do it, but her Dr told her he was going to be sure she got approved (rather than elective) because if she didn’t get it soon she could die (blood vessel issue).
At his hospital over 99% of doctors are vaccinated and 97.5% overall. He said those who weren’t were almost totally cafeteria workers, janitors, and similar with just a small handful of nurses and one doctor. I’m thinking the latter had to or will have to give up their jobs.
And yesterday the boy came home pissed that there was “another” protest out front - most coming in from outside the area to make their statements. He avoided that entrance, but still had to ride his bike past a couple of _____s who were holding signs on the corner. He said he purposely avoided eye contact.
His GF who deals with post recovery people, Covid and other, said they’re still losing a fair number after recovery - usually blood clots causing strokes or similar. I don’t know if those get counted as Covid deaths, but they feel Covid likely caused the clots so they might. She also said it can take days, weeks, or months for people to be able to go home as there aren’t enough spaces in rehab facilities. (This is for both post Covid and other.) The rehab system all around here is full.
There’s more than just active Covid keeping hospitals filled to the brim.
ETA just checked NYT numbers for this county (in NY). There are 29/100,000 active new cases per day (+6% two week average) with 19/100,000 hospitalized (+20% two week average - not necessarily new daily for hospitalizations). 1.4 daily deaths. 64% are fully vaccinated. Not many die, but no one knows who will draw the short straws and far more have major lingering issues.
ETA2: Those numbers, even rising, are lower than the numbers in my own county and the one right next door (we live very near the border of the two). At home our numbers are decreasing, but for now our numbers are still higher - except vaccination rate that is. That’s only 49% where I live. No surprise the per capita rates are higher. And in the nearest hospital to us, no ICU beds are available so drive carefully and put off that heart attack!
Here, hospitalization for Covid was going down slowly, but has plateaued and ER doctors are still very concerned. Plus, they are seeing more and more children seeking treatment for Covid.
I live in a highly vaccinated state (MA, if you can’t tell from my screen name–I’m not MAD, but am a Dad from MA), and we have plateaued around 1200-1500 new cases per day. In June we were <50 per day. Ugh.
I like to think that sooner or later we’ll head back to those numbers. It seems we mainly have to wait for Covid to make its way through the population and school restarting should have given it a good way to do so. The chief worry is a new variation or waning of vaccines for those of us who have chosen to use vaccines as a shield to help our encounter. If everyone had chosen to use the vaccine shields I doubt Covid would make the news much anymore.
In our family we’ve been wondering how many in the unvaxxed/vaxxed groups are afraid to swim in the ocean, fly, or similar things due to perceived danger. It would be an interesting poll IMO.
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Would many people really worry about COVID-19 swimming in the ocean, as opposed to other potential hazards of that (e.g. rip currents, jellyfish stings, etc.)? Though there probably are some, given the number of masked people I see in uncrowded outdoor situations in a highly vaccinated area.
Probably a more common situation that is more applicable across demographic groups is how willing they are to go into indoor stores, eat in indoor restaurants, etc. compared to pre-COVID-19 times, since not everyone goes to swim in the ocean or fly on airplanes.
I am sure that community ties are hard to loosen, but I was talking with a hospital exec a few months ago who was concerned about how to retain nurses who were leaving because they were getting offers from other parts of the country at much higher hourly rates. Seemed like recruiters should be pretty active. I wonder if all of the potential movers have already moved. I’m assuming the same would be true for doctors.
But, if I were in their shoes, I would be looking to move to a place where the quality of my work would be a lot better because it seems unlikely that the political environment around Covid and new variants coming out and new vaccines/boosters will shift. Beyond the silliness of hydrochloraquine and Ivermectin, we now have real drugs (Merck and I think another) that should reduce the probability of hospitalization and death once infected. But even with those, I would feel deeply frustrated spending my time/mental and emotional effort trying to keep alive patients who explicitly chose not to take steps to dramatically reduce the probability of infection.
I do know that moving is non-trivial. ShawD is a nurse practitioner who does primary care and when she moved states, it took months to have her credentials accepted (despite the fact that she took the harder of the two accreditation exams and finished in 30 mins – meaning that her answers were all or almost all correct – when many people take half a day or more to do so). In the interim, she worked some temp NP jobs she didn’t really enjoy. Somehow her out of state credentials worked for them.
I was meaning wouldn’t swim in the ocean due to fear of sharks, fly due to fear of crashes, etc - totally independent of Covid. Are they afraid of things with low odds less/same/more than the vaxxed group? Do they wear seatbelts to try to shield themselves in car accidents?
Is their lack of respect for what Covid can do consistent with their beliefs or does it differ?
The October 2021 issue of SMITHSONIAN has an excellent article called “Plague Among Children – How we fought Diphtheria”. I knew that Diphtheria was a disease that children were vaccinated for, but I never knew just how deadly it was. Wow!! The article should be required reading for everyone. I wish that the anti-vaxxers would read it, but then they would claim that Covid is not as deadly as Diphtheria.
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For many workers, pay rate and comparative cost of living will be the decisive factors in determining which job to take. Not all that many have the luxury of choosing an ideologically compatible town.
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It is also recommended that adults get boosted every 10 years. The ‘d’ in Td or Tdap vaccine is diphtheria vaccination.
Let’s see how long Kyrie Irving holds out…the Nets banned him today from practicing or playing with the team: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/12/sports/basketball/kyrie-irving-vaccine.html
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@roycroftmom, agreed. That is part of the reason that tech folks have been moving from the Bay Area to Austin, for example. In our current environment, with many jobs untethered from office locations, there is a great opportunity for arbitrage (at least for a while).
But, nurses and doctors are tied to physical locations. I would guess that locations with higher vaccination rates tend to also be locations with higher costs of living places. But, the correlation is no doubt far from perfect. If so, I would guess that there should be opportunities for equal or better living-expense adjusted compensation in higher vax environments.
Interesting that some of the ~10% of NBA players who refuse vaccination get the attention, versus the ~90% of NBA players who got vaccinated (a much higher rate than the general public in the US).
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@ucbalumnus, more persuasive messaging, per Robert Cialdini’s research, would emphasize the overwhelming proportion of young, healthy, fit basketball players who have already gotten vaccinated rather than focusing on those who have chosen not to be vaccinated.
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Thank you. I will look for it.
I discovered it had existed when reading Out of the Deep I cry by Julia Spencer Fleming. A great mystery, good characters.
The NYT has this report on reluctance among police officers - also noting that Covid has killed more active duty police officers than any other work related cause.
A few quotes from the article:
"Over the last year and a half, a majority of the roughly 40 police officers who patrol Baker, La., a suburb of Baton Rouge, tested positive for the coronavirus. All of them recovered and went back to work — until Lt. DeMarcus Dunn got sick.
Lieutenant Dunn, a 36-year-old shift supervisor who coached youth sports and once chased down someone who fled the police station after being arrested, died from Covid-19 on Aug. 13. His wedding had been scheduled for the next day.
Chief Carl K. Dunn said he had assumed that the lieutenant, a distant relative, was vaccinated, but thought it would be inappropriate to ask. It was not until after the death, the chief said, that he was told Lieutenant Dunn had not gotten a shot. For some others in the department who had been resisting vaccination, it was a turning point."
" More than 460 American law enforcement officers have died from Covid-19 infections tied to their work since the start of the pandemic, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. More than four times as many officers have died from Covid-19 as from gunfire in that period. There is no comprehensive accounting of how many American police officers have been sickened by the virus, but departments across the country have reported large outbreaks in the ranks.
While the virus has ravaged policing, persuading officers to take a vaccine has often been a struggle, even though the shots have proven to be largely effective in preventing severe disease and death."
"Law enforcement and union officials cited disinformation, misleading claims by prominent conservatives and distrust in how vaccines were developed as reasons that some officers had resisted getting shots; many other Americans cite the same factors.
But some officials theorized that the daily dangers of police work may also make an invisible virus seem less of a hazard, and vaccination less high a priority, for the police.
Sheriff John Mina of Orange County, Fla., said that officers deal with “violent criminals all the time carrying guns, and I think they think that may be more of a threat.”
“It is nearly impossible to work from home or maintain social distance as a police officer, and at least 125 law enforcement officers have died from Covid-19 since the start of August, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a nonprofit group that tracks line-of-duty deaths (and has not yet counted Lieutenant Dunn’s).”
“Several of the most recent deaths have been reported in young officers: Freddie Castro, 23, of the Overland Park, Kan., police; Joseph Kurer, 26, of the Fond du Lac, Wis., police; Jennifer Sepot, 27, of the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., police.”
“If this was cops getting shot on the streets of America today at this number, there would be outrage,” Mr. Wexler said of Covid-19’s toll among officers. "
I saw this military report on Covid deaths/vaccinations today. One thing that sticks out to me is the timing of the deaths.
“Those deaths bring the total in October so far to eight, less than half-way into the month. September saw 14 deaths while August saw 15, up from an average of one or two deaths a month previously.”
Military folks are younger and generally relatively fit, so why so many more deaths in August-October? Have there been more cases (I don’t know - article doesn’t say), or is Delta more lethal? The latest 5 range from 49-54, but a Sept list I saw had three in their 30s - way too young odds-wise. Oldest on that list was still just 54.
“Of those 67, 66 were completely unvaccinated, while one had received a first dose of a two-dose vaccine,”
It’s amazing how much data is out there supporting vaccines now (though the early date deaths were prior to vaccines, of course).
From that Military Times page, percentage vaccinated:
Total: 60% fully, 15% partially, 75% fully or partially
Active duty: 84% fully, 13% partially, 97% fully or partially
Marine Corps Reserves: 38%
Army Reserve and Army National Guard: 40%
The Army Reserve and Army National Guard accounted for 53% of deaths since August, and 39% since the pandemic began, even though they make up about 20% of the military overall.
Delta caused a surge in infections and cases generally. More infections and cases means a greater chance of someone having a bad outcome.
I read through most of the comments and have a few thoughts to add on the whole debate.
In talking with friends who are opting to “wait” and “see” they have some very real concerns.
- The vaccine approval process seemed to go much too quickly; the authorities and experts have done a poor job actually explaining how the FDA approval process was indeed scientifically based. The immunity rates are not even discussed any longer given the delta variant and studies coming out of Israel.
- Many pro-vaxx authorities ridicule folks who have questions and concerns about getting vaccinated. One of the major health-care systems head physician has a weekly podcast. A few weeks ago someone wrote in about their vaccine hesitancy because they were pregnant. Instead of acknowledging the concerns; he immediately laughed and intimated it was a stupid question… just get vaccinated was his response. The history in our country with drugs is really not great. One could look at opioids or the class-action lawsuits advertised on TV daily.
- Congress is not under the mandate. Yes, the executive branch cannot mandate anything for the legislative branch… however, many Americans see this type of political maneuvering as very elitist. Thus creating a real skepticism about the mandate.
- What about those who have already had covid and have long-term immunity?
- There is a study being conducted by the NIH on covid vaccination and impacts on fertility. There are some real concerns about this issue.
- Booster shot push by the White House and then the FDA pulling in the reins.
Politics should have absolutely no bearing on whether someone should/or should not get vaccinated. It should be a decision between doctor and patient.
For a lot of folks all the inconsistencies, shaming, forcing language, etc. makes people concerned about the intentions.
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