Quote (Sioux @ Dec 20 2021 10:51pm)
If a given disease is twice as transmissible but half as lethal it'll be worse on hospital ICUs. That's the power of exponential growth.
But young, healthy, Trump-loving WASP chuds don't go to hospitals even with the twice as lethal virus, unless they're the landwhale variety.
Most of the arguments around hospital capacity got a giant hole blown through them back over a year and a half ago during the initial outbreak in NYC when the USACE was contracted to build all those field hospitals in anticipation of mass casualties, then wound up decommissioning millions of dollars and tens of thousands of beds worth of field hospitals that served zero patients in many cases, a handful in others. It showed we actually have the resources to break out extra emergency capacity in a crisis that demands it, but this crisis didn't demand it. But now here we are over a year later, with the vaccines, with clear proof that the burden is almost entirely on the fat/elderly/immunocompromised, and Biden elected president after campaigning on a promise not to mandate vaccines, after refusing to mandate them all throughout the stages when it would matter most. And now they're pushing ahead with both very authoritarian measures to mandate the ineffective measures that put the burden on people they disagree with politically, while refusing to take the effective measures that would put the burden on their supporters. If you refuse to get vaccinated you can't even work in NYC, but if you get vaccinated you can go to bars and clubs with thousands of people packed in. And what has been the outcome? NYC has been the case study showing zero difference from other major cities without such restrictions. They're still setting record numbers of new cases during this current wave, surging each day and spike rapidly, this omicron wave is even bigger than the last two waves in NYC.
The longer this drags on the more obvious it gets that these policies are grounded only in political animus, not scientific pragmatism. Masks and Vaccines don't stop the spread. Lockdowns do. They don't have the stomach to lock themselves down, but they'll pillory the anti-vaxxers for their own sins.