Some nursing homes were ill prepared & didn’t react fast enough. Those became the showcase that made it seem like the entire collection of NY/NJ nursing homes were death traps. Just like the few protests that suffered riots, painted as the entire movement was violent (it hasn’t been). Of course, politicizing of science has always happened—it’s the degree of it. Especially on critical factors. There are still climate change deniers scoffing at the wild fires of the west in the USA, claiming “poor forest management”. No. Management policies & manning haven’t had any drastic changes. The climatology data is the only dynamically changing factor here. Droughts like never before seen in those regions. The WHO has its notable share of problems, but their interfacing with China was flawed. Not transparent as with other countries, and too much info directly given, without proper scrutiny. So the WHO echoed China’s messaging, the worst about their allegedly being “very limited risk of human-to-human transmission of the virus.” However, in 2003, the WHO properly called out China for its lack of preparedness & transparency. The organization does work & serve a purpose. It needs “correction.” USA refuses to lead on this.
To be fair, the governors in NY, PA, etc. were following guidance from the federal and state health authorities, who feared a shortage of hospital beds and recommended putting a priority on keeping hospital beds free for new admissions. The nursing homes were told they should isolate people who tested positive from the other residents. Many nursing homes failed to do that, for various reasons. Also, many nursing home residents were infected by staff, not by other residents.
Some states, like MN, actually had a higher percentage of their COVID-19 cases in nursing homes without an order from the governor similar to those issued in other states. That was in part because their health departments were moving active COVID cases to nursing homes due to the same concern about hospital bed capacity being inadequate to meet the coming demand.
If they were active covid cases then why be moved at all. Just because of their age?
Well 007, looks like this tread has outlived it’s usefulness. More politics than science.
See post #5657
So old people weren’t worthy of a hospital bed? Make room for a person that has more chance of living?
I think we became expendable.
No, the idea and direction from the authorities was to take stable patients who didn’t have the worst cases and transfer them to nursing homes so that hospitals could have beds available for as many as possible of the more acutely sick patients that were expected that needed immediate emergency intervention. We’re evaluating their decisions with the benefit of knowing exactly how many hospital intensive care unit beds were needed in June and later - but they didn’t have that information before then, nor did they anticipate that many nursing homes would not be honest or not be realistic about whether they were prepared to handle residents with the virus in a safe way.
The states were obviously not equipped with either the knowledge or the resources to develop safe, effective policies and implement them. But they had no choice, as there was no federal government program to address the projected hospital bed shortage, and little federal government guidance on the problems faced by the states.
This is an analytical video of politics in America by Second Thought on YouTube.
The comment section on the video also stayed very healthy, so I am not anticipating any flare-ups here in this thread. I will delete if things get dicey.
So pass the buck?
I thought we fought a war over State’s rights, do we need a war over State’s responsibility as well?
Using drugs off-label is done all the time.
But there’s a difference between taking no position and letting people (whose lives are ultimately on the line!) roll the dice that using the drug will cure and not kill, and absolutely forbidding anyone from using it at all.
A “non-professional” (non-EMT, etc.) giving someone CPR can actually crack ribs, and if done really wrong can actually puncture the lungs and/or heart. Would you favor banning CPR by “non-professionals” because it might do more harm than good, vs letting the person almost surely die?
There is, or at least should be, a sacred relationship between patient and doctor. If both are informed, and both consent, that HCQ and whatever mix of Zn and vitamins, etc., can help if the patient came down with the kung flu, who in Hell are politicians to refuse to let them go that route??
We’re not talking “alternative therapy” like proclaiming bleachwater and soothing music will cure it, but something that was tried and reported to work. Just because 25 double-blind studies weren’t done doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be tried. Probably more people would die from lack of HCQ-related therapy than any who supposedly got the wrong dosage. And that’s political. Even if Fauci plays dumb and says “We don’t know for sure if it’ll work”, Cuomo mugs for the camera and absolutely forbids it.
Absolutely. Ordering that was tantamount to murder.
You had old-timers who were in fragile condition as it was, sequestered, the staff was being screened and used proper hygiene, and then those homes were ordered to take in patients known to have the bug and ended up killing off those who would have stayed safe and alive and bug-free.
Well, that’s one way to reduce SSI payouts…
The state governments didn’t pass the buc, as I explained in my post.
As for the alleged “war over states’ rights,” I won’t go off topic other than to suggest the best one-volume book about the USA civil war, which describes the USA in the years preceding, during, and immediately after the war, and explains why the war happened: “Battle Cry of Freedom,” by James M. McPherson.
Where was it tried and reported to work?
Government grant money on both sides? The 3 most damaging examples of the perversion of science that I can think of were executed by private money.
1. The sugar industry bought scientists to obfuscate legitimate science showing the harmful effects of added sugar in our food supply and create a false narrative blaming fat.
2. The tobacco industry bought scientists to obfuscate legitimate science showing the harmful effects of tobacco and perhaps more importantly launched an effective campaign questioning science. (Blaming government grants etc…)
3. The fossil fuel industry and their allies in the media bought recycled the playbook from the tobacco industry to discredit the legitimate science of climate change.
Where would the US have ended up if they would have simply accepted the testing protocols developed in Germany and published by the WHO rather than loose the valuable time they lost fixing the broken wheel they unnecessarily created in the first place?
That actually sounds like the answer our governor would give. I guess the key to your statement is, that you “can think of”. But… then again, the Bill of Rights is over our governors paygrade :person_facepalming: his words not mine. I’m sure you would have agreed that closing state parks was following the science as well, right?
Several times when the federal government was talking about reopening, which states did most of the crying about being dictated to? Then when they got their way, they refused to take responsibility with some governors not even following their own guidelines or the science.
I don’t know who your governor is and don’t understand your point. Certainly the closure of any state parks is no where near the impact of the impacts of excess sugar, tobacco, or carbon. If science had been followed we would have acted far earlier and been able to deal with this without such broad scale interventions as closing state parks. Frankly if people behaved according to what we actually know from science — airborne disease distance and mask. Closing or opening the parks would not have a meaningful difference. If individuals actually took responsibility for protecting their neighbors rights no government intervention would be necessary. Unfortunately, as is clearly shown in the USA, far too many people only care about their own rights and don’t understand that they can not have those rights if others behave as they do.
You seem intent on repeatedly criticizing governors for trying to come up with a way to accomplish what the federal and state health experts were recommending, and for responding to the predicted upcoming shortage of hospital beds and critical care facilities, at the same time they were dealing with the emerging economic crisis in their states. Considering that only a few screens back you asked the moderator to close the thread due to its political content, that’s ironic. It’s perfectly appropriate to criticize what was done in any emergency, but suggesting that the mistakes were made with malice or recklessness about human lives is not accurate or fair.
As I pointed out earlier, the directives from the states to nursing facilities to take Covid-19 patients were made on the condition that each such facility confirm with the state that they were able to safely and effectively care for the patients they took, before patients were transferred. The governors were told by the federal government that they would need to free up more hospital beds for the coming onslaught of critically ill patients. When the states asked the feds for help doing that, they were told they were basically on their own. The governors had to do something. What would you have done instead of what they did, given the lack of money and time and resources? More to the point, what would you have done instead of what they did that could not be criticized later for the negative consequences?
The governors not following the science were the ones reopening too early, according to the federal government task force’s guidelines. The states complaining about being dictated to were alarmed by the federal government urging them to relax their restrictions and open up before their states’ infection and death rates met the requirements of the federal government’s own guidelines.
You can be a Monday morning quarterback and self-righteously accuse the governors of murder, but they would have also been accused of murder when the hospitals ran out of room for the acutely ill, as predicted by the experts, and people died for that reason. And that did happen in some states. It’s easy to criticize them after the fact. By the same measure, then, you have to adjudge the actions of our federal government leaders at least as harshly.
Here’s a weird one for you. One of our friends brought her new boyfriend over for dinner recently and he claimed that he never heard about Covid. Big country boy who spends most of his time hunting and outdoors. No cell phone, internet, doesn’t watch tv or read the newspaper
I have to admit it sounded like a peaceful life. Obviously he didn’t wear a mask (: