Hospitals have been jam packed the entire time. There is data everywhere to support this. Tons of procedures are not being done due to beds and ICUs being full. Ask anyone who works in a hospital. Call one if you'd like.
This is second hand from someone close, but not too close in the military, so details are off but the narrative is on track:
The Mercy was deployed after some communication between New York hospitals, and the understanding at least was that it would mostly be handling emergency, trauma, and routine patients (what military docs are good are at as a stereotype), and free up capacity for the hospitals to deal with COVID. The "normal" medical stuff promptly dropped in demand with lockdown, between fewer accidents and deferred care. So there wasn't much for the Mercy to do, the few covid patients sent over were about all of an "unknown air transmissible virus" (working theory at the time) that it was really equipped to handle, because that wasn't the mission they were expecting.
That makes sense in New York but we knew more about the situation when she was in LA and when the USNS Comfort was in New York later on. (Also I put USS Mercy when it should be USNS Mercy)
"Another of the Navy’s two hospital ships, the USNS Comfort, was sent to New York City to treat non-coronavirus patients. However, after treating only a few dozen patients, the Comfort changed its rules to allow coronavirus-positive patients on the ship.
The Comfort had been docked in New York Harbor in Manhattan since March 30 but departed last month for its Norfolk, Va., home port after treating just 182 patients."
ICUs are at max capacity all the time pre-pandemic. In fact a study done in 2013 IIRC showed that you could pick any random date and any random hospital in the U.S. and there was a 16% chance it was at max capacity.
So again, my question is this - if hospital capacity is truly a crisis, why have staffed beds been in decline since the beginning of the pandemic? Half a million healthcare workers have left their jobs since just the start of the pandemic. If this is a crisis, why isn't there any initiative to get them back? Instead the only initiative we've seen with regards to healthcare workers is massive layoffs firstly because of lockdowns, but then later also massive layoffs because of vaccinate rules.
So either this is a terrible problem with no solution, or the problem is exaggerated and it's not really a crisis.
Thats just not true. I found the study you're referencing and it says in 2013 mean ICU occupancy was 68%. If you zoom out on the map you'll see the US avg is 83%. Did you even look at it? Some states are like 9/10 at 100% capacity.
Staffed beds are not in decline, and of course hospitals are trying to get more workers, they are offering crazy pay incentives right now.
the dark gray represents ICUs in the studied time window (which wasn't 2013, it was a study done in 2013, the study measured ICUs from 05-07)
Here's an interesting fact[1]. 2020 hospital capacity in the US after the start of the pandemic never even got up to the projected capacity as projected using data from 2015-2019. So no, I don't believe these scary-tale anecdotes I've been reading the entire pandemic. They are not backed in data they are backed, at best, in bullet points without context designed to scare the ignorant.
I like how the public health folks don't connect the dots. MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS are tired of the stuff they are hearing.
I know some folks who had covid, and just don't want to trigger their bodies systems again with a series of shots.
For some reason, if you have other diseases your immune system likely provides some protection against re-infection, but we are being told covid is different. This just seems so likely to be a lie its mind boggling.
Let healthcare works test their blood for cross-reactivity with omicron / antibodies. If you are equal or better than some threshold (pfizer vaccine from 10 months ago) you get a card and are good to go.
> For some reason, if you have other diseases your immune system likely provides some protection against re-infection, but we are being told covid is different. This just seems so likely to be a lie its mind boggling.
I don't know what you're talking about. There is some protecction, it's not enough to make things safe, what's the lie?
If you're talking about those people still having to get a vaccine, that's a whole mess of tradeoffs but also not based on lying.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-hospitals-...
Hospitals have been jam packed the entire time. There is data everywhere to support this. Tons of procedures are not being done due to beds and ICUs being full. Ask anyone who works in a hospital. Call one if you'd like.