Covid-19

[kmcrawfo]

The US now has as many confirmed cases as China:
https://topic.newsbreak.com/covid-19.html?s=web

And.... China now opening their country back up:

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com...w/74797480.cms

The downside to our open/free society is that we really can't do what China and S. Korea did. That is the blessing of the USA and possible curse of the COVID-19.

Now... the blessings of our free society is that our healthcare system is second to none. We are scaling up in major cities in preperation for the wave. We can't lock it down like China did, but we will be able to scale and hopefully handle the surge better than Italy and China did.

Somehow, it appears, Japan did both and is not getting killed by this.

[bobbiemcgee]

Dyson invented a vent in 10 days and sez he can deliver 10k by April. Where are our guys?

[smileyy]

Is that our healthcare system is second to none

Then where are the ICU beds and PPE? Late stage capitalism has stripped our health care system to the bone.

Health care cannot be for-profit.

[GoMuskies]

Is late stage capitalism one of the new buzzwords/talking points?

[noteggs]

We always need new buzzwords. Does sound eerily close to cancer, so that should work.

[Lloyd Braun]

Where is the bailout for hospitals and outpatient offices? Question for Dr. Crawford and anyone in similar positions: will you have to lay off employees due to this? As hospital staff becomes scarce, they have had to incentivize doctors/HCPs to cover shifts. That isn’t cheap, and that cost has to be made up somewhere...

[smileyy]

Is late stage capitalism one of the new buzzwords/talking points?

"New gilded age" describes the same thing. Long since unseen wealth disparities as workers have protections stripped away and the margins on their labor cut to the bone.

[xavierj]

So maybe it’s not quite as bad as a lot of people want to believe?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi..._analysis.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.was...ss%3f_amp=true

[Lloyd Braun]

So maybe it’s not quite as bad as a lot of people want to believe?

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/vi..._analysis.html

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.was...ss%3f_amp=true

Nice sources! Smh

I can’t believe there is argument of its severity and the value of lockdowns. The overwhelming evidence for lockdowns should be enough to allow common sense to take over. There will be a time that the economic benefit of ending lockdowns outweighs disease risk but we don’t seem close to that.

[kmcrawfo]

Then where are the ICU beds and PPE? Late stage capitalism has stripped our health care system to the bone.

Health care cannot be for-profit.

The united states has bay far the most ICU beds in the world per capita. When you add the scalability to our system we blow everyone out of the water. We also have the most PPE by a wide margin. We have more labs doing tests, but have had a shortage of the actually swabs/kits. HOwever, the swabs and kits are out there. Part of the problem is that many hospitals are not aware of which labs can do the testing. This week I personally setup 2 regional hospitals who said they did not have access to testing with a lab in Atlanta that is now getting them results in 24 hours. Before that they were waiting 8-10 days for results and did not have enough swabs. I donated to them 125 kits from my own offices which could be repurposed and used for the test. They just didn't know this lab even existed.

There also was a PPE vendor in Kentucky with a surplus of recently produced PPE which I am helping get connected with local hospitals. We do have a communication issue, but it is because of our capitalistic system that private industry is being invoative now. My neighbors own a distillery and they are now making hand sanitizer in 50 gallon batches to supply to hospitals, firestations, etc.

In terms of ICU numbers before we started to scale up our system if I recall the ICU Beds per capita was something like this:

USA had about 35 ICU beds per 100,000
China had 3 ICU beds per 100,000
Italy had 12 ICU beds per 100,000
Spain has 9 ICU beds per 100,000

This was before Vanderbilt turning an entire parking garage into an extension of they Hospital, the US military deploying their floating hospital ships, FEMA building hospitals and ICU beds where needed, etc.

Do we have enough, probably not. Will people die because they can't access care. Most likely. Are we better able to handle this than any other country from a healthcare standpoint. Also almost certainly.