"https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/03/24/map-where-are-the-intensive-care-beds-in-california-the-u-s/ This article indicates approximately 7500 ICU beds in California. https://covid19.ca.gov/state-dashboard/ This article indicates there are about 3200 ICU patients suspected of having Covid. "The number of hospitalizations due to confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases in California reached a total of 15,198, an increase of 620 from the prior day total. The number of ICU patients due to confirmed and suspected COVID-19 cases in California reached a total of 3,193, an increase of 115 from the prior day total." In the entire state of California. 3200 ICU patients. This is not a pandemic."
Au contraire: As our drill instructor informed us once, "There are no stupid comments, only stupid people." Welcome to a Teaching Moment.
If you wish, you can read the comment and match it with the owner, but for ease today, we'll make the author He Who Shall Not Be Named, abbreviated HWSNBN, which we will use before the fisking (and flogging) begins.
1) Actually, CA has about 7800 ICU beds. This has nothing to do with anything, except as a bare fact.
2) What percentage of ICU patients have COVID is irrelevant to anything either. If you think otherwise, you're trying to fly an airplane in clouds, in the mountains, using a thermometer.
3) The salient point about ICU beds was, as stated, the point that they're almost all full hereabouts. That means if you get shot, stabbed, have a heart attack, or a stroke, or a serious automobile accident, or simply a raging ordinary infection, or need any form of 300 types of intensive care, which cannot be competently handled by lesser-trained nurses, with lesser facilities, you're going to die. Brighter lights among the readership and commentariat will recognize that people dying of things we normally could keep alive is a bad thing. And those people aren't imaginary: they're going to happen, they aren't going to get ICU beds, and they're going to die. I personally bagged and tagged one just the other night.
4) As we warned those same brighter lights months and months ago ad infinitum, hospitals in general, and the ICU in particular, are like airline flights: if they aren't at 90% or better occupancy, 24/7/365, they're losing money. So we run - every goddam day since ever - at 95% of capacity or better. In short, the lifeboat is already damned near full, before we even add the stormy seas of a raging pandemic.
5) For Common Core grads, 3200 ICU patients, statewide, because of COVID, isn't the other 5% of ICU capacity. In a state with 7800 ICU beds, that's 41%. So what HWSNBN has just Gilligan-logicked into oblivion is that he thinks hospital ICUs (usually chronically short-handed at the best of times) can handle running at 136% of design capacity, in a system where 25% of staff or more are already MIA, because they're stressed out, under investigation for COVID infection, actually sick, or just DGAF about picking up the extra shifts and staffing openings we have, at any price.
6) Merriam-Webster cleverly defines pandemic, for the ignorant, and/or illiterate:
"Occuring over a wide geographic area (such as multiple countries or continents) and typically affecting a significant proportion of the population."
According to the Johns-Hopkins Kung Flu infographic map, COVID cases have been reported in every country on the planet, and damn near every BFEgypt inhabited island on every speck of the map. 73.8M cases, and 1.6M deaths, to date, and over 305K US deaths, which is only 4 times worse - so far - than the worst annual flu season that ever was. (And this dance ain't over yet by a damned sight. Not even close to it.)
That's a PANDEMIC, fucktard.
Kids, this is what happens to society when you give high school diplomas to dipshits who can't tie their own shoes.
And worse, why you have a pandemic that won't quit, because you were depending on kids who should have been flunked out of 7th grade eight or nine years running, because they couldn't pass a science class that was any harder than watching a PBS episode of Sesame Street, and yet still expect them to do something as complicated as remembering to wash their hands regularly, and wearing a sneeze guard mask, for longer than the lifespan of a fruit fly.
The one inarguable silver lining amidst the Kung Flu coal-black cloudbank that's washing its storm over the country, is its infallible utility in churning the Gilligan chunks right to the top of the foam in the septic tank of civilization, so they can be seen. The crushing pity, conversely, is that it doesn't kill them deader than canned tuna for their failings, but instead leaves the younger, healthier ones free to kill older and usually wiser heads, like the No-So-Smart Bombs they are.
We close with the sage advice of Will Rogers to those who don't know what they're talking about:
11 comments:
I don't consider Covid to be a hoax. What I do consider to be a hoax is the severity of the disease that is being hyped, when it is no more lethal than most seasonal flus, though it does appear to be more contagious. The vast majority of healthy individuals exhibit symptoms that are not much more than a really bad cold, which is itself a corona virus. And, the death count is way over-inflated:
https://week.com/2020/04/20/idph-director-explains-how-covid-deaths-are-classified/
It's 4 times worse than the worst seasonal flu ever, right now, and it's getting worse, not better. I've also carried all those over-inflated death-count bags to the morgue for the last 10 months, like I've never done, even once, for any case of seasonal flu.
One would ask how close to the mountain you intend to fly at Mach 6, before you think about pulling up.
Don't mistake draconian stupidity, and taking political advantage of the actual crisis to become dictatorial, with any actual evidence this is no big deal.
People can be evil, and this can be the real deal, without anything cancelling the other one out. Everybody keeps wanting to ignore their lying eyes, and see this through political-colored glasses, but the virus doesn't give a damn who you voted for.
Alas, it's AT LEAST unbelievable incompetence, I think more
"They" have been doing a damn fine job of burning their credability
https://filiperafaeli.substack.com/p/yes-hydroxychloroquine-is-scientifically
I'm glad you post about Kung Flu because it gives me a place to come where the host is not in denial about what's actually going on, so thank you.
There must be a name for this kind of extrapolation fallacy. 7800 available in the entire state does not mean that one will be available for someone in Orange County or wherever should they need it. I've been trying to get this across to people since this all started: hospitals crushed by Kung Flu have fewer resources for the ruptured ulcers, car accident victims, any other problem modern medicine could solve. And resources include training staff, whom the Kung Flu deniers are more than willing to throw under the bus.
I wonder how many people who are imagining that this is just a hoax will be the first to start screaming about hiring a tort lawyer if (God forbid) we wind up looking like Italy before this is all over and hospitals have to turn people away.
~Rhea
A question Aesop, because I am genuinely curious (and have more than a passing interest in California): LA has some of the strictest (at least in name) shutdown requirements in the state. It is an county that is largely blue and therefore (I would assume) more likely to follow the instructions of a equally blue mayor and administration. That said, how is it they continue to spike?
(For the record and as I have posted, I now have two relatives in the hospital with The Plague: One that will be on hospice today or tomorrow and one that has slowly gone from being in the hospital and oxygen to being intubated and in an ICU, so not hopeful).
@ThbB,
1) My sincere sympathies for the plight of your relatives.
2) To answer your question:
a) the largest and most mollycoddled homeless population in Creation, mostly shipped here from 49 other states.
b) Mexico is less than a 2 hour drive, once you sneak across, and no enforcement to ship anyone back
c) in your experience, do Blue Hives have populations of brighter people than average, or dumber ones?
d) Are those in c), above more likely to follow the laws as everyone else, or to believe in "laws for thee, but not for me" virtue signaling lip service?
(and recall how many times you've seen or heard of people - like an L.A. County supervisor, with more power hereabouts than a US Senator, and half the IQ - passing a law to lock restaurants down again, and then going out to eat dinner, right afterwards, just to get one last hogtrough-fest in under the wire)
Sensible and brief limited lockdowns would work if it was intelligent, rational people, and rational policy moves rather than draconian endless lockdowns. The first one worked, because people listened (NYFS: 50K dead; CA, then, less than 3K dead). Now, they barely pay lip service to the concept. We're reaping that fruit here, now, as are most other states.
This is Califrutopia, made so by the toothless banjo-playing kinfolk from 49 states who've moved here for 60 years, finally getting exactly the liberal wet dream hellhole they wanted, in spades.
I just hope to live to see it go bankrupt, and totally crash, like the former Soviet Union, and for identical reasons.
That's gonna be a GREAT day!
Thanks Aesop, for the answers and the sympathy. To be honest, I find myself largely alone in my thoughts in that I believe (and have always believed) that The Plague is more the flu which sets me apart largely from one group but also believe the shutdowns and heavy enforcement have made things far worse than better, which sets me apart largely from the other group. It's a hard go nine month in.
COVID-19 isn't a hoax.
But we know far more about it now, than we did back last March.
Despite what Gabbin Nuisance says, it IS NOT an equal opportunity disease. It is FAR more deadly to folks over 70, particularly those with co-morbidities.
"This year, in the United States, more children have died from the seasonal flu than from COVID by a factor of two or three.
Whereas COVID is not deadly for children, for older people it is much more deadly than the seasonal flu. If you look at studies worldwide, the COVID fatality rate for people 70 and up is about four percent—four in 100 among those 70 and older, as opposed to two in 1,000 in the overall population.
Again, this huge difference between the danger of COVID to the young and the danger of COVID to the old is the most important fact about the virus. Yet it has not been sufficiently emphasized in public health messaging or taken into account by most policymakers."
From here: https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/sensible-compassionate-anti-covid-strategy/
Almost all the nurses at the er at our nearby hospital in michigan have quit or are trying to. She finally is leaving too. She only has 5 shifts left and will be going to a rural hospital as a medical coordinator (thank god).
She has been a cc paramedic for 20 years and a rn for 12 but just couldn't take the jackassery being fomented on the staff any more. They have burned out and abused the staff since the start of covid and now are reaping the whirlwind.
They are down to a handful of staff and about 14 travalers, but all of those tell her they are getting the hell out too once their contract is over. Its such a dangerous situation with no leadership, very little ppe (STILL!!!) and all experienced staff already gone.
They stopped doing elective surgeries at the hospital again, have turned the entire surgical wing to covid and she sees at least 10- 15 er holds every night. They are having to take 6-8 patients each, with 1 or 2 being crits...just insane. She is lucky to get a piss break in twelve...and lunch...ha.
After my wife finishes her final shift its going to be a total shit show with no poop pickeruppers. And all these clowns keep saying its fake, well whatever it is, there wont be any staff at one of only two ers in a city of 210,000 people...hope they dont need much mergency meds overs and above bandaids and motrin.
Seasonal flu this year is mostly a no-show, due to a large-scale use of hand sanitizers, hand washing, masking, and isolation. I don't see many pediatric patients where I am now, but I highly doubt that more kids have died from seasonal flu in any year, let alone this one, primarily because "annual deaths from seasonal flu" are entirely made up numbers, based on SWAGs from hospitalizations, and a metric fuckton of dubious assumptions by the CDC.
Hey, waitaminute, that sounds familiar, almost like I've seen it somewhere else...
And COVID is absolutely an equal opportunity disease.
Death from it, OTOH, not so much.
It clearly skews rightwards on the x-axis of age.
Language means things, objectively, and word choices matter.
Aesop said....
Language means things, objectively, and word choices matter.
Ok, ok.....
"As a disease, COVID isn't equally fatal to all persons, it is far more deadly to those over 70 and/or with significant co-morbidities, while having a very low lethality factor for children under 14."
Better?
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