I am a physician in a private practice in FL next door to an urgent care. Whenever I walk over there to get my mail, the lobby is empty and the nurses are texting on their phones. I even asked them over the summer how the delta was affecting things. They giggled and said it was the "older people/worried well with sniffles who had been vaxxed who were testing positive". The populace is still scared to go there. It worries me that they will shut down due to going bankrupt. The hospitals have a financial incentive to continue to "cry covid" and get the sickest intubated people shuffled thru, there is a government bounty tied to the +PCR and until that is rescinded--I can dream right?--things will never be normal. I read a recent article that stated 20% of all healthcare workers over the past 18 months have been reshuffled/retired/quit/started new jobs and this churn is causing massive stress to those left behind in the trenches. The doctors and nurses are in hysterics over having to mask/gown all day long for 18 months--every patient is a bag of virus!--my question is why continue to mask if you're not sick/ symptoms? STOP THE PERFORMANCE THEATER. I no longer wear a mask in my office nor do I "make" anybody wear it either. I wore the same dirty mask for 3 weeks at a time last year when I couldn't buy any for my clinic and I literally had 5 masks left, and after my 3rd eyelid chalazion from steam blowing up to my eyes and the end of the "Health Emergency" in FL, I stopped in May 2021. Not one person has been infected from being in my office, nor myself, in 18 months of this BS and I'm a doctor taking care of elderly and immunosuppressed patients. One at a time, each one us must push back and live as normally as possible.
Arizona hospitals are raking in record profits in 2020-2021. Our volumes have been at record lows. (We who work in emergency medicine in Arizona can tell you all sorts of stories about the record breaking low volumes of patients since March 2020.) How are they making so much money, then? They’ve cut staff. Many places are running at staffing less than half of what they had prior to COVID. Now that they know they can get away with it and still make boatloads, this trend will continue. Medical care will continue to worsen.
Anecdotal- have a friend who is a school nurse and her daughter is an ER nurse. The hysteria from her is nonstop but NOTHING ever pans out to the extent she predicts. A few weeks ago it was all about how many schoolchildren had Covid, how many were hospitalized. When I followed up, all were fine. This type of hysteria has been ongoing from her since Feb 2020. Every day is doom and gloom, hospital overwhelmed, etc. It never pans out.
I live near a suburban hospital in Denton County in Texas. My Mom was hospitalized there for a non-COVID issue. I know what floor is the "COVID floor" and having driven past there for several nights during the week, there are NO LIGHTS ON IN THE BUILDING ON THAT FLOOR. Even at the height of the pandemic when leftists were urging all kinds of draconian shutdowns, no lights, not ever. But, several months later when my Mom showed up at the ER with breathing issues the day after her first Pfizer shot, the ER refused to admit her citing "COVID preferences" and after one dose of Lasix, returned her to assisted living with fluid still on her lungs-as we found out after she died four days later. The medical officers running these hospitals are scrambling to send seniors home to die while raking in money from the Fed. That's just wrong. I suspect we'll find out the true cost of "free" vaccines when retiring congresscritters start cashing out their stocks.
Great article, what that ER physician was really saying is that she was overwhelmed. You see, during residency training physicians get put through long training and face alot of stress. Everyone has a limit - training, education and experience help stretch that envelope. But when you have young physicians speaking out like this - what it means is that she is overwhelmed. Now that me be truly overwhelming, or it may be that she had to work for the first time in a couple of days.
Another thing that people dont understand is bed availability and staffing. Hospital may have a hundred or so beds open - but only so many of them are staffed with nurses and techs etc. Furthermore, before "the pandemic" it was not uncommon for hospitals to run near full occupancy. Especially ICU's I mean - nobody keeps 20-40% of ICU beds open and unused.
The most fearful and scary thing to me however, was how on a local level the health systems were so unprepared. They had no pandemic plan, no isolation wards, no proper PPE for workers. They became fully dependent on federal agencies for guidance. Truthfully, many of the patient deaths were likely medical errors in diagnosis - any many more errors in treatment. I will give you an example. In our facility they placed patients in Isolation rooms - unfortunately, these were scattered all over the hospital on every ward. So infectious patients with an airborne virus were spread all over the hospital - and they were transported to the OR and CT scanners through common elevators, hallways etc. I mean, it was literally like the 3 stooges episode. Then when it became clear that the virus was transmitted in an airborne way, hospitals denied this until it became only all too obvious.
Another huge blunder, that is never talked about. Its the monoclonal antibodies developed by Lilly and REGN as well as others. Treatment with these on an outpatient basis will prevent something like 70% of hospitalizations or more. During the winter outbreak at our facility I asked a leadership person how many doses are we giving a day? I thought maybe we would be giving 2-300 or so. Answer - well he didn't know. So I went over to the infusion center and asked. 1-2 per day. Thats right 5-600 positive tests a day at our hospital and 1-2 preventative actions being taken. The hospital was just telling people to "go home and come to the hospital if you are sick". Its unreal. By the way, if you criticize the leadership, you get fired. Many good nurses and other personnel were escorted put of the building.
For the life of me - I cannot understand the national response to the monoclonal therapy. Its so effective - and it was totally ignored by Fauci and the CDC in favor of vaccinations. I think, and this is total conjecture, that Fauci and company were so afraid that they would be unable to secure an EUA for an untested vaccine.
Maybe the health care worker vax mandates were an effort to cull staffing without paying unemployment expense? 2020 and 2021 salaries, wages and benefits rose to an unsustainable percent of patient revenue.
I can add a few more real world data points to this. Part of my job involves the health care plans for our business. We have around 5,000 employees. Our workforce skews younger, but we tend to see both sides: A majority are in their 20s, but we have a significant minority who are over 50 and usually retired from another job.
At any rate, we offer health insurance and the majority subscribe to one of several health plans we make available. We're self-insured and pay at least 80% of the premium, sometimes more, depending on the plan.
In April of 2020, I sat down with my finance team and forecasters. We all agreed that we needed to significantly increase our estimates for company health care expense. This was a standard budgeting exercise. Again, we're self-insured, so we pay for claims on a lagging basis once bills get presented by doctors and hospitals to our third-party administrator.
By the end of the year, all lagged claims were rolling in and a clear trend had emerged: Costs were way down -- 40% from the previous year, across the board. No one was going to the doctor unless they had to do so. We had some COVID cases; there were ongoing and expensive medical management claims -- people who were seriously ill from pre-COVID conditions and needed continuing care. But, everyone else stopped going to the doctor. Not just ICUs; everything.
It's definitely started to trend back up this year, but it's still well below 2019 levels. We saw similar things with our dental plan, as well. Office visits were significantly lower in 2020 and 2021 as compared with 2019.
Just a few more anecdotes that support this thesis.
The extra PPE and contagion protocols must slow down the processing of ER patients. This slog combined with the extra anxiety of dealing with infectious people probably contribute to the feeling of frustration and inundation.
Thus some extra data on the burden of pandemic protocols and staff/patient ratio might be enlightening on this topic.
But clearly, hospitals have had all the time in the world to ramp up and build capacity for dealing with sick people. The fact that they have not done so is not the fault of individual ER doctors, but laying the blame at the feet of administrators for an artificially bad situation in which one finds oneself is more accurate than blaming the public for being stupid and the politicians for inaction.
And what about the failure of the system to provide early treatment options instead of, "wait until you are really sick and then come to the ER"?
GREAT ARTICLE!!! HHS website is something i have followed to the dismay of some of my family members. When i show them in real time, they get VERY irritated... aaaand it's a govt website, which makes them all the more pissed...
The decade long nursing shortage is also to blame for hospitals saying their hospitals are OVERFLOWING. They laid off tons of employees, continue to do so because many don't want to be jabbed with an experimental drug that's only 1 year into testing... so yea it might feel/look busy, but it's inflicted by bad decisions, not covid.
"people all over the US are having similar experiences as they go back to in person work and try to start moving at the rapid pace they used to. people are quitting jobs and having breakdowns in droves. they got used to working 5 hours a day in their jammies. a return to normal is a big step up in workload."
Hit the nail on the head. I am considered "essential' (I am a CPA in the alcohol supply chain), was physically present at work the entire "pandemic". Nothing changed for me other than the traffic flow on the freeway and what covid shenanigans we had to deal with when going out for lunch.
I know a lot of people struggling to get back into the routine of kids to school, off to work, pick kids up, ect. It's quite fascinating to watch.
Official data was recently released for Germany in 2020.
Overall hospital bed utilization was in the mid 60s, (ICUs were also reduced by 30% due to fraudulent incentives for hospitals to do so and to instill more urgency and fear into the population, a separate scandal, later proven.)
Covid patients used up 1.9% of all bed days, 3.4% of all ICU bed days and at most 5% of capacity at the peak.
These are official data.
Only a few proper journalists discovered and wrote about it, the MSM ignored it. So did and does the government and the people.
We might also look at the numbers of medical staff layoffs and hospital closings in 2020 -- and wonder why hospitals are now laying off (nonvaxxed) staff again in record numbers if they're so overwhelmed or even looking ahead to being overwhelmed.
PSYOP-19 has been an utter scam to destroy the world as we knew it, and for the cabal to extract ever more wealth from this dying financial system. If you're not getting murdered by eldercide, hospital protocols, denial of medicine, and other medical corporate fascism, then you remain an ever more impoverished debt-slave tax mule on the corporate plantation USSA.
Using available beds is a misleading measure since for profit hospital system has steadily decreased the actual numbers of total beds available & it's even worse as a percentage of growing population. "Trends indicate that the overall number of hospital beds in the U.S. is decreasing. In 1975, there were about 1.5 million hospital beds in the U.S., but by 2019 the number had dropped to just about 919 thousand." https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hospital-beds-in-the-us-since-2001/
One interesting point regarding the RI shown above is that despite COVID the hospital is running at a high rate of capacity, further demonstrating your point. Hospitals want beds full. So, they’ll try to run up against capacity. And it’s happening regardless of Covid.
There’s nothing that’s happened in the world of hospitals in the last two years, with few exceptions, that hasn’t happened before. Morgue trucks, tents, over capacity. It’s all happened.
If hospitals were facing that level of crisis, then they shouldn’t have had the layoffs last year, shouldn’t be fired unvaxxed, and had 18 months to figure out expansion and emergency plans.
I am a physician in a private practice in FL next door to an urgent care. Whenever I walk over there to get my mail, the lobby is empty and the nurses are texting on their phones. I even asked them over the summer how the delta was affecting things. They giggled and said it was the "older people/worried well with sniffles who had been vaxxed who were testing positive". The populace is still scared to go there. It worries me that they will shut down due to going bankrupt. The hospitals have a financial incentive to continue to "cry covid" and get the sickest intubated people shuffled thru, there is a government bounty tied to the +PCR and until that is rescinded--I can dream right?--things will never be normal. I read a recent article that stated 20% of all healthcare workers over the past 18 months have been reshuffled/retired/quit/started new jobs and this churn is causing massive stress to those left behind in the trenches. The doctors and nurses are in hysterics over having to mask/gown all day long for 18 months--every patient is a bag of virus!--my question is why continue to mask if you're not sick/ symptoms? STOP THE PERFORMANCE THEATER. I no longer wear a mask in my office nor do I "make" anybody wear it either. I wore the same dirty mask for 3 weeks at a time last year when I couldn't buy any for my clinic and I literally had 5 masks left, and after my 3rd eyelid chalazion from steam blowing up to my eyes and the end of the "Health Emergency" in FL, I stopped in May 2021. Not one person has been infected from being in my office, nor myself, in 18 months of this BS and I'm a doctor taking care of elderly and immunosuppressed patients. One at a time, each one us must push back and live as normally as possible.
I am somewhat dismayed that you have ONLY 10K subscribers. Your work deserves 10M or 100M subscribers!
Arizona hospitals are raking in record profits in 2020-2021. Our volumes have been at record lows. (We who work in emergency medicine in Arizona can tell you all sorts of stories about the record breaking low volumes of patients since March 2020.) How are they making so much money, then? They’ve cut staff. Many places are running at staffing less than half of what they had prior to COVID. Now that they know they can get away with it and still make boatloads, this trend will continue. Medical care will continue to worsen.
Anecdotal- have a friend who is a school nurse and her daughter is an ER nurse. The hysteria from her is nonstop but NOTHING ever pans out to the extent she predicts. A few weeks ago it was all about how many schoolchildren had Covid, how many were hospitalized. When I followed up, all were fine. This type of hysteria has been ongoing from her since Feb 2020. Every day is doom and gloom, hospital overwhelmed, etc. It never pans out.
I live near a suburban hospital in Denton County in Texas. My Mom was hospitalized there for a non-COVID issue. I know what floor is the "COVID floor" and having driven past there for several nights during the week, there are NO LIGHTS ON IN THE BUILDING ON THAT FLOOR. Even at the height of the pandemic when leftists were urging all kinds of draconian shutdowns, no lights, not ever. But, several months later when my Mom showed up at the ER with breathing issues the day after her first Pfizer shot, the ER refused to admit her citing "COVID preferences" and after one dose of Lasix, returned her to assisted living with fluid still on her lungs-as we found out after she died four days later. The medical officers running these hospitals are scrambling to send seniors home to die while raking in money from the Fed. That's just wrong. I suspect we'll find out the true cost of "free" vaccines when retiring congresscritters start cashing out their stocks.
Great article, what that ER physician was really saying is that she was overwhelmed. You see, during residency training physicians get put through long training and face alot of stress. Everyone has a limit - training, education and experience help stretch that envelope. But when you have young physicians speaking out like this - what it means is that she is overwhelmed. Now that me be truly overwhelming, or it may be that she had to work for the first time in a couple of days.
Another thing that people dont understand is bed availability and staffing. Hospital may have a hundred or so beds open - but only so many of them are staffed with nurses and techs etc. Furthermore, before "the pandemic" it was not uncommon for hospitals to run near full occupancy. Especially ICU's I mean - nobody keeps 20-40% of ICU beds open and unused.
The most fearful and scary thing to me however, was how on a local level the health systems were so unprepared. They had no pandemic plan, no isolation wards, no proper PPE for workers. They became fully dependent on federal agencies for guidance. Truthfully, many of the patient deaths were likely medical errors in diagnosis - any many more errors in treatment. I will give you an example. In our facility they placed patients in Isolation rooms - unfortunately, these were scattered all over the hospital on every ward. So infectious patients with an airborne virus were spread all over the hospital - and they were transported to the OR and CT scanners through common elevators, hallways etc. I mean, it was literally like the 3 stooges episode. Then when it became clear that the virus was transmitted in an airborne way, hospitals denied this until it became only all too obvious.
Another huge blunder, that is never talked about. Its the monoclonal antibodies developed by Lilly and REGN as well as others. Treatment with these on an outpatient basis will prevent something like 70% of hospitalizations or more. During the winter outbreak at our facility I asked a leadership person how many doses are we giving a day? I thought maybe we would be giving 2-300 or so. Answer - well he didn't know. So I went over to the infusion center and asked. 1-2 per day. Thats right 5-600 positive tests a day at our hospital and 1-2 preventative actions being taken. The hospital was just telling people to "go home and come to the hospital if you are sick". Its unreal. By the way, if you criticize the leadership, you get fired. Many good nurses and other personnel were escorted put of the building.
For the life of me - I cannot understand the national response to the monoclonal therapy. Its so effective - and it was totally ignored by Fauci and the CDC in favor of vaccinations. I think, and this is total conjecture, that Fauci and company were so afraid that they would be unable to secure an EUA for an untested vaccine.
Maybe the health care worker vax mandates were an effort to cull staffing without paying unemployment expense? 2020 and 2021 salaries, wages and benefits rose to an unsustainable percent of patient revenue.
I can add a few more real world data points to this. Part of my job involves the health care plans for our business. We have around 5,000 employees. Our workforce skews younger, but we tend to see both sides: A majority are in their 20s, but we have a significant minority who are over 50 and usually retired from another job.
At any rate, we offer health insurance and the majority subscribe to one of several health plans we make available. We're self-insured and pay at least 80% of the premium, sometimes more, depending on the plan.
In April of 2020, I sat down with my finance team and forecasters. We all agreed that we needed to significantly increase our estimates for company health care expense. This was a standard budgeting exercise. Again, we're self-insured, so we pay for claims on a lagging basis once bills get presented by doctors and hospitals to our third-party administrator.
By the end of the year, all lagged claims were rolling in and a clear trend had emerged: Costs were way down -- 40% from the previous year, across the board. No one was going to the doctor unless they had to do so. We had some COVID cases; there were ongoing and expensive medical management claims -- people who were seriously ill from pre-COVID conditions and needed continuing care. But, everyone else stopped going to the doctor. Not just ICUs; everything.
It's definitely started to trend back up this year, but it's still well below 2019 levels. We saw similar things with our dental plan, as well. Office visits were significantly lower in 2020 and 2021 as compared with 2019.
Just a few more anecdotes that support this thesis.
The extra PPE and contagion protocols must slow down the processing of ER patients. This slog combined with the extra anxiety of dealing with infectious people probably contribute to the feeling of frustration and inundation.
Thus some extra data on the burden of pandemic protocols and staff/patient ratio might be enlightening on this topic.
But clearly, hospitals have had all the time in the world to ramp up and build capacity for dealing with sick people. The fact that they have not done so is not the fault of individual ER doctors, but laying the blame at the feet of administrators for an artificially bad situation in which one finds oneself is more accurate than blaming the public for being stupid and the politicians for inaction.
And what about the failure of the system to provide early treatment options instead of, "wait until you are really sick and then come to the ER"?
GREAT ARTICLE!!! HHS website is something i have followed to the dismay of some of my family members. When i show them in real time, they get VERY irritated... aaaand it's a govt website, which makes them all the more pissed...
The decade long nursing shortage is also to blame for hospitals saying their hospitals are OVERFLOWING. They laid off tons of employees, continue to do so because many don't want to be jabbed with an experimental drug that's only 1 year into testing... so yea it might feel/look busy, but it's inflicted by bad decisions, not covid.
"people all over the US are having similar experiences as they go back to in person work and try to start moving at the rapid pace they used to. people are quitting jobs and having breakdowns in droves. they got used to working 5 hours a day in their jammies. a return to normal is a big step up in workload."
Hit the nail on the head. I am considered "essential' (I am a CPA in the alcohol supply chain), was physically present at work the entire "pandemic". Nothing changed for me other than the traffic flow on the freeway and what covid shenanigans we had to deal with when going out for lunch.
I know a lot of people struggling to get back into the routine of kids to school, off to work, pick kids up, ect. It's quite fascinating to watch.
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/2_prozent_pandemie_bundesregierung_wusste_alles_
Official data was recently released for Germany in 2020.
Overall hospital bed utilization was in the mid 60s, (ICUs were also reduced by 30% due to fraudulent incentives for hospitals to do so and to instill more urgency and fear into the population, a separate scandal, later proven.)
Covid patients used up 1.9% of all bed days, 3.4% of all ICU bed days and at most 5% of capacity at the peak.
These are official data.
Only a few proper journalists discovered and wrote about it, the MSM ignored it. So did and does the government and the people.
We might also look at the numbers of medical staff layoffs and hospital closings in 2020 -- and wonder why hospitals are now laying off (nonvaxxed) staff again in record numbers if they're so overwhelmed or even looking ahead to being overwhelmed.
PSYOP-19 has been an utter scam to destroy the world as we knew it, and for the cabal to extract ever more wealth from this dying financial system. If you're not getting murdered by eldercide, hospital protocols, denial of medicine, and other medical corporate fascism, then you remain an ever more impoverished debt-slave tax mule on the corporate plantation USSA.
Using available beds is a misleading measure since for profit hospital system has steadily decreased the actual numbers of total beds available & it's even worse as a percentage of growing population. "Trends indicate that the overall number of hospital beds in the U.S. is decreasing. In 1975, there were about 1.5 million hospital beds in the U.S., but by 2019 the number had dropped to just about 919 thousand." https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hospital-beds-in-the-us-since-2001/
One interesting point regarding the RI shown above is that despite COVID the hospital is running at a high rate of capacity, further demonstrating your point. Hospitals want beds full. So, they’ll try to run up against capacity. And it’s happening regardless of Covid.
There’s nothing that’s happened in the world of hospitals in the last two years, with few exceptions, that hasn’t happened before. Morgue trucks, tents, over capacity. It’s all happened.
If hospitals were facing that level of crisis, then they shouldn’t have had the layoffs last year, shouldn’t be fired unvaxxed, and had 18 months to figure out expansion and emergency plans.