It is cold outside and snow is falling, along with COVID infection rates. But while the Omicron surge is receding fast, hospitalization rates are still high, consisting mostly of the unvaccinated. Likewise, deaths, which are still above 2,500 a day - 74% of last winter’s peak - are twenty times as high in the unvaccinated.
Bertie, It's great to see you as a wonderful caring adult doctor. My memories are of you as a naughty 7th grader trying to get me to innocently use rude words in Madame Marshall's 7th grade french class! The ethics discussed in the NYTimes article are about scarcity, the lifeboat problem. I would argue that as a society we should be building more capacity so that there is no need for deciding between patients for basic care. The fact that we built and dismantled tents, but not a single infectious disease treatment center separate from surgical hospitals is disheartening. It's like we learned very little from this event. As bad as COVID has been, it could have been far worse. A disease with a longer incubation period and more lethality could yet emerge. I pray you can continue to treat all patients who come to you, and I hope that we can mandate more capacity, and minimal standards for nurse coverage in hospitals, because the profit motive and corporate hospitals are a major force in the opposite direction.
This reminds me of the stories we were hearing at the peak of the pandemic when there was a shortage not only of ICU beds but also of ventilators. The ER doctors were facing an excruciatingly tough dilemma when they would have to choose between caring for an older patient with comorbidities who they pretty much knew he/she didn’t have many chances of making it through, versus a younger healthier patient. Only one bed/ventilator, what would Maimonides do?
Bertie, It's great to see you as a wonderful caring adult doctor. My memories are of you as a naughty 7th grader trying to get me to innocently use rude words in Madame Marshall's 7th grade french class! The ethics discussed in the NYTimes article are about scarcity, the lifeboat problem. I would argue that as a society we should be building more capacity so that there is no need for deciding between patients for basic care. The fact that we built and dismantled tents, but not a single infectious disease treatment center separate from surgical hospitals is disheartening. It's like we learned very little from this event. As bad as COVID has been, it could have been far worse. A disease with a longer incubation period and more lethality could yet emerge. I pray you can continue to treat all patients who come to you, and I hope that we can mandate more capacity, and minimal standards for nurse coverage in hospitals, because the profit motive and corporate hospitals are a major force in the opposite direction.
This reminds me of the stories we were hearing at the peak of the pandemic when there was a shortage not only of ICU beds but also of ventilators. The ER doctors were facing an excruciatingly tough dilemma when they would have to choose between caring for an older patient with comorbidities who they pretty much knew he/she didn’t have many chances of making it through, versus a younger healthier patient. Only one bed/ventilator, what would Maimonides do?