Quote (Goomshill @ Jan 4 2022 12:03pm)
Why either instead of all of the above? If omicron is as non-deadly as the data suggests and yet gives you strong immune response against the deadly variants- which also stops their spread- that's a pretty good argument for it
Hospitalization rates and waiting times aren't a good indicator, especially given the competing issues of large amounts of asymptomatic / non-serious cases at hospitals being reported at the same time as hospitals being short staffed due to employees on covid quarantine from omicron / fired due to no vaccination.
Since the beginning of the pandemic I've said that the excess death rate is the only measure that's actually grounded in hard data you can trust. The hospitalization rates, reported related deaths, anecdotal evidence, etc etc are all subject to bias and misrepresentation and rarely show causal relationships, like NY reporting any death with a covid positive test in the past 90 days. When the covid pandemic hit the first spike, the excess deaths at national, state and local levels suddenly skyrocketed- it was clear people were dying from covid en masse. But now omicron is spreading like wildfire with several times the size of that surge, and excess deaths haven't even budged. South Africa has already finished its wave of omicron and there's no excess deaths at all from it, reported deaths at their lowest level since the pandemic began.
There's no way that this data can be sold to say that omicron is 1/3 as deadly as previous variants. If it was 1/3 as deadly and yet affecting 5x as many people in NYC, we'd see a huge number of deaths in NYC with 20% of the state unvaccinated. It would be immediately statistically identifiable. Right now, the effects of Omicron are so mild that its indistinguishable from background noise
Not responding to it all cuz it’s a lot but
1. Hospitalized COVID patients separate asymptomatic and symptomatic and refer to the latter. Has been happening for the last year+ across the country. We know exactly how many incidental COVID vs symptomatic /sick/oxygen requiring etc, they even go to different floors. If you’re being honest and objective, should have no difficulty in acknowledging hospitalized covid19 (referring to COVID patients requiring oxygen) are increasing across the country
2. Staff and ratios don’t matter anymore, the work just gets spread thinner. Very few nurses across the country were fired and anyone who filed a religious excemption had theirs granted. What dictates beds is literally just that , amount of beds. In 2019 I was rounding on 15 patients a day and now new normal is 19-25 depending on the day. Nursing normal ratios are 1:4 and 1:5 and now they are pushed to 1:10. Lol, truly laughable numbers. Nurses are quitting though at record rates , not because of the vaccination though. To become traveling nurses and work for the highest bidder. Fair play tbh
3. Excess death is only one part of the equation, by fixating on this statistic alone ur missing the big picture. It’s been 2 years, therapeutics have improved and will continue to improve. We went from dumbass hydroxychloroquine to standardized steroid regiments. Excess death does not take into account the 55 year old who spent 10 days in the hospital. Loss of work , hospital bills, loss of future work, future loss of time from doctor follow ups, etc. doesn’t take into account the mental health hit of being isolated in a hospital for that timeframe. It doesn’t look at grandma who broke her hip and now has her surgery delayed 3 days due to staffing issues . Doesn’t look at the 50 year old dad with an old fashion heart attack who would have gone to the cath lab in 2018, but instead we had to opt for a medical approach and just optimize his meds so now he’s just going to have some heart failure exacerbations going forward. Looking at excess mortality alone in 2021 (2022) is intentionally ignoring the big picture. I’m not saying ignore it, I’m saying give proper credit to your statistics and have enough insight to also acknowledge their shortcomings