Wuhan Coronavirus: Megathread - Got too big

[Andy Ngo]

So they used a work crew to unload one truck and suddenly the media has a problem with using prisoners for cheap labor

 

[Freshly Baked Socks]

In my light reading, it seems like average prisoner wages are under a dollar per hour, so earning doublepay makes it sound like an enviable chore.

edit: MERGED INTO THE COVID MEGATREAD? ok.

 

[General Disarray]

I lost it when the CDC called racism a public health crisis and many government entities either directly or indirectly approved the protests. Also when I heard CA thinks strip clubs are essential but churches are too dangerous. Thank God I don't live there though.


Up until like August soooo many cancer treatments, general surgeries (things that get worse as they are delayed) were delayed due to lack of COVID testing. That doesn't even touch the number of patients skipping screenings or treatment on their own.

I had to field a call of a surgeon saying the anesthesiologist won't even enter the room because the COVID test wasn't done (all preops are symptomless going in testing or not). I was almost brave enough to tell him to contact that doctor's ethics board because that level of paranoia and fear of a sick person is a breach of ethics but I cucked and just linked the medical director to deal with it.

I already had very little faith after just a couple of months, but what you mentioned about the racism (our county was one of the first to declare it a 'public health emergency') definitely was the thread that started to pull the sweater apart. Our County Health Commissioner, who is the color of very creamy coffee, decided to bug out of the Midwest for greener pastures in DC after said declaration. During a pandemic, lol.

The governor's addresses from then on were all about spending that CARES act money, and the pitiful occupancy rate of the very expensive State Fair Park overflow facility (that only opened because they had to, if they didn't they'd miss the deadline for spending those Fed dollars) sealed the deal.

We all know obesity is a factor when it comes to Covid fatalities. So what does out Governor tell everyone in his address right before Thanksgiving? Not just stay home, wear a mask, etc. but he ends the spiel with "Go ahead and eat up! We know we're asking a lot of you, so treat yourself and consume."

I mean, I understand the sentiment and all, but it seems rather irresponsible to encourage unhealthy binge eating.

 

[Not Really Here]

Oh my god so many death in texas!!11111!!

Um....I was expecting more.

 

[ColtWalker1847]

They did a service to the community and now they have some cash to spend in the commissary. What's the problem here?

Just because they are prisoners doesn't mean they aren't willing to help. More than you think have a sense of civic duty.

 

[CivilianOfTheFandomWars]

Not gonna lie, my dog is pretty much the only reason I haven’t an heroed yet.
All it is is work all day in a muzzle, go home, repeat. I do everything I’m supposed to as well. No fast food, workout over an hour a day, sometimes twice a day, be ‘grateful’ I have a job that exposes me all day everyday to the virus, all the shit I’m supposed to do to get through this. But man, I just kind of want to give up and die or whatever.
Sorry for the edge.

 

[verygayFrogs]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/nurse-strained-el-paso-hospital-135436368.html

---

A travel nurse has described the "horrific" scene at one hospital in El Paso, Texas, a city that has emerged as a new hotspot as the weathers its third and likely deadliest wave of the coronavirus.

In a nearly hourlong Facebook Live video published last Saturday, Lawanna Rivers said that she had served five postings at various hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, but her time at the University Medical Center of El Paso was by far the worst.

"Out of all the COVID assignments I've been on, this one here has really left me emotionally scarred," she said. "The facility I'm at has surpassed the one I was at in New York." New York was the epicenter of the US outbreak in the spring.

Rivers was most upset about how the sickest patients at the hospital were treated. She said they were all put into an area called a "pit," where they are essentially left to die.

"My first day at orientation, I was told that whatever patients go into the pit, they only come out in a body bag," Rivers said.

https://sneed.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/zHh6ovTjg7Qidcn96l0Xyg--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/business_insider_articles_888/1ed4e7c1eb00d51ab9a79722b95a6fe6
A nurse enters a tent for coronavirus patients at the University Medical Center of El Paso on October 30, 2020. Cengiz Yar/Getty Images
Rivers said doctors at the hospital would not enter the area, and nurses like herself who were stationed in them were under orders to perform CPR just three times on a patient before letting them die.

Rivers said she learned that doctors wouldn't enter the pit when she called a physician for help one day with a patient who was bleeding profusely. She said the doctor told her they don't go into the rooms for the sickest COVID-19 patients, so as to not expose themselves to the disease.

In the three-and-a-half weeks that she was at the hospital, Rivers said she never once saw a doctor go into a COVID-19 pit.

"The doctors don't even step foot in those COVID rooms to see those patients ...We as nurses, it's OK for us to be exposed, but you as doctors, you don't even come in there. You can't get exposed, but we can and y'all are making all the money," she said.

Rivers said that she volunteered to work in a pit every day, hoping that continuity of care would help her patients get better — but that it didn't matter because they were too sick by that point.

Rivers said she believes that if the patients had received better care earlier on, it may have made a difference.

"I have never experienced, and have no words, for what I just experienced in El Paso, Texas," she said. "If those doctors there would aggressively treat those patients from the beginning, a lot more would make it."

Rivers also accused the hospital of giving special treatment to the wife of a doctor once. She said this woman, whom a nurse at one point called a "VIP" patient, was the only person to make it out of the ICU alive during her nearly a month at the hospital.

"They pulled out all the stops for that woman, it was nothing that they didn't do for that woman. And guess what? She was the one patient that made it out of the ICU alive, and was able to downgrade to a longterm acute care. So you mean to tell me because she's a doctor's wife, her life meant more than any of those other patients?"

https://sneed.yimg.com/ny/api/res/1.2/n1CUgYvTFoMK_z2nHX2uFg--/YXBwaWQ9aGlnaGxhbmRlcjt3PTk2MA--/https://media.zenfs.com/en/business_insider_articles_888/03eadc15214db3b9a808925467cefe22
The University Medical Center of El Paso. Google Street View
In another shocking testimony, Rivers described how a worker once wheeled in a dead body into her unit because the morgue was full.

"The morgue was so full of bodies that they had ran out of room, so once the doors opened to the pit they come wheeling in a body already in a bag," she said.

"Lined 'em up with the rest of our alive patients, because they had to store the body in there, because the morgue was out of room. They've had to bring in freezer trucks because there's so many bodies."

Rivers said that she left her assignment in El Paso early because she couldn't bear to watch more patients die.

"I've seen so many deaths in this last month, than I've seen in my entire 13-year career," Rivers said.

She said she was also afraid for her life, and the kind of care she would receive if she got sick there.

"I kept saying: 'I can't get sick here in Texas, because if I get COVID here in Texas ... I'm going to die. It was that bad," she said.

Business Insider has contacted the University Medical Center of El Paso for comment.

The hospital has been releasing the same statement to local outlets about Rivers' video.

"After watching the video, while we cannot fully verify the events expressed, we empathize and sympathize with the difficult, physical and emotional toll that this pandemic takes on thousands of healthcare workers here and throughout our country," hospital spokesman Ryan Mielke said in the statement, according to KFOX 14.

"This particular travel nurse was at UMC briefly to help El Paso confront the surge of COVID-19 patients."

Texas currently has the most coronavirus cases in the US, according to Worldometer, and El Paso county has the third-most infections in the state, according to the Texas health department.

Earlier this month the county doubled its number of mobile morgues — which are typically refrigerated trucks — to store COVID-19 victims' bodies, and KFOX 14 reported that patients were dying at such a rate that medical examiners have not been able to keep up.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Something seems off about this story.

 

[Toolbox]

It's not even "trust the experts" anymore. It's now "trust what some random nurse says". How long is it going to take until they're just publishing the word of homeless people as fact?

 

[waffle]

Nurses are the biggest drama queens in the world and COVID makes all their panties wet over thier martyrship. Pics or it didn't happen.

 

[Not Really Here]

Texas population is around 29 million and their average for the last few months is well under 100 deaths per day.

 

[ShortBusDriver]

A local Democrat judge threatened to throw them in jail for working during the pandemic

She sounds like the type of person who wears her scrubs to the grocery store on her dayoff

 

[Blake Chortles]

Not gonna lie, my dog is pretty much the only reason I haven’t an heroed yet.
All it is is work all day in a muzzle, go home, repeat. I do everything I’m supposed to as well. No fast food, workout over an hour a day, sometimes twice a day, be ‘grateful’ I have a job that exposes me all day everyday to the virus, all the shit I’m supposed to do to get through this. But man, I just kind of want to give up and die or whatever.
Sorry for the edge.

God has a plan for everyone, including you. That doesn't preclude suffering unfortunately and I can relate to the muzzle and exposure all day. Take heart friend.

 

[Sekirodiealot]

I'm pondering about something.. pro-restriction are all saying they follow the science™ . But it make me wonder, us human being can we really handle and understand a society ruled by science?
Let me explain science, the concept itself is is about uncertainty and questioning. Unquestionable fact/true in theory are antonym of science.
Before all that, it was the dark age a world ruled by theocracy. Religion are based on certainty and truth. As rigid and backward this way of life can be it may reassure the dumb and overly emotional populace of the unknown.
Nowadays we technically deleted religion and ''replaced'' with science. But we still have the same dogmatic view and struggle to challenge what we think as hard fact. So in the end we didn't replace we just renamed thing
Also it well know that big lobby can corrupt and influence current scientific search

The pro-lockdown party will get mad and say science is not a religion despite them treating it like it's infallible

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Oh my god so many death in texas!!11111!!
View attachment 1756261
Um....I was expecting more.

This number looks scary because they've brainwashed us into believing that this disease can be totally eradicated. Which might've been true back in January or February if China weren't ran by corrupt fucks who ignored their disease and then decided to show it to the rest of the world. Yet we still operate under the paradigm that we can somehow eradicate the disease no doubt as part of the sunk cost fallacy for all the economic damage that's been caused thanks to listening to The Science. That's part of why they obsess about the number of cases even if it's almost totally irrelevant to the actual damage the disease is causing.

Something seems off about this story.

Key observation--there isn't a single number or statistic given in that story. How many bodies? How big is this morgue? If your morgue can only hold 5 bodies and you now have 6, your morgue is "overflowing with bodies".

 

[ColtWalker1847]

Something seems off about this story.

Other than just the story of one nurse, yeah.

El Paso is a border town. If you wanna see some Covid shit head south. Mexico hasn't been doing super-great in the late summer. Whaddaya think the odds are that they moved a bunch of severe cases across the border from Juarez. I mean, isn't a little odd that Chihuahua has unusually low covid numbers compared to it's neighbors meanwhile things are spilling over in El Paso?

 

[FatMan]

Our retarded governor has now put a reopening plan in place that will ensure we never actually reopen again. She calls it the "red to green plan". The 2 criteria are less than 8 daily cases per 100,000 people, and less than 5% positivity rate. If neither are met the county is red, if one is met it's yellow, if both are met it's green. During red, everything is at 25% capacity or 75 people, no dine-in. Yellow is 25% capacity or 125 people, including dine-in. Green is 50% capacity. These bullshit numbers will only be updated every 2 weeks. Fucking ridiculous.

 

[verissimus]

https://www.theblaze.com/news/japan-suicides-covid-deaths-pandemic

From the article : 'In the United States, experts found that tens of thousands of people in nursing homes "have died from neglect and sorrow related to the pandemic," according to a report from the Associated Press.'

Yeah, and I bet those people were counted as covid deaths anyway.

 

[Disheveled Human]

Last month when I went to visit my mom in the hospital non covid related but emergency situation to drop some stuff off to her (Big City), It was a fucking ghost town and at the time the covid numbers were starting to balloon Hospitals are pretty baron I was served immediately and maybe only saw 30 people total including staff when i went the hospital was down town and wait times for talking to staff is usually at least 10-15 mins just to talk. So shit is not very busy.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

Patience is going to inevitably wear thin when you keep insisting on making people's lives miserable "for their own good", and we're getting closer to the next economic depression the longer these lockdowns go on.

Some people are already experience economic depression. In Michigan alone, many people that filed unemployment claims back in March -- nearly 8 months ago now -- still have yet to get their claims approved due to some form of bureaucratic red tape. Meanwhile, they have no money coming in and a mounting stack of bills to pay. Whitmer and other governors need to stop the grandstanding and help their citizens get the unemployment benefits they're entitled to.

But, you're right, @Vault Boy, about the tunnel vision thing. Many of those in power are so obsessed with getting rid of COVID once and for all they can't see the bigger picture. Ordering everyone to stay home for 2-3 undoubtedly looked good on paper. Unfortunately, there's a ripple effect in that people staying home aren't always working, meaning they have less money to pay bills, and there's less payroll taxes flowing into the state/federal treasuries, etc. It feels like none of these elected officials even stopped to consider what the budgetary impacts would be the longer various businesses stay closed. As has been stated numerous times already, they certainly didn't do much to consider peoples' mental health being stuck at home with little to nothing to do since the Spring.

Theres literally zero incentive for a public health 'expert' or a doc to be non doomer. They always err on the side of overcaution because why the fuck wouldn't you. Theres never any personal consequences for them being overcautious and a large potential cost if the .1% chance thing happens.

It's possible to have a public role in mental health and not be a doomer unnecessarily. However, that's not what's popular in today's times. People early on needed to know that COVID appeared contagious and more-so for people not in good health while at the same time being told simple steps such as regular hand-washing (especially after using the restroom) and avoiding large crowds as much as possible are good things to do until more could be learned about COVID. Instead, we get the worst-case doomsday scenario drilled into our heads so much that most normies have probably tuned it out and figured they may as well do whatever they want if it doesn't matter in the end.

I stopped taking my local health authorities seriously when they recommended the use of glory holes for safe sex during the pandemic, glory holes being recommended because they help avoid face-to-face contact.

Stuff like this really makes me wish we had a dedicated WTF rating. The biggest head-scratcher for me was when our Governor ordered certain sections of hardware/home improvement stores shut down. I don't think anyone I know ever figured out what the link was between planting seeds or performing household DIY maintenance and COVID transmission. The paint ban was particularly grating because I wanted to touch up some spots on my car while it wasn't being driven as much. Instead, I had to wait for the asinine paint ban to be lifted.

He was spitting mad about the entire thing was handled as well.

Doctors are quite frustrated right now. The original stay at home orders threw a monkey wrench into people's regularly-scheduled appointments. Now that doctors are actively trying to clear the backlog as much as possible, they now have patients who fear they could get COVID from the doctor's office even though most are going above and beyond to minimize that possibility and have patients taking more precautions such as not touching doors on their way in or out or having them wash their hands at the end of the appointment. Still, there are those that would rather avoid the doctor for now even if it means forgoing needed medical exams and procedures, and that sucks as an unintended side effect from all of this.

I stopped taking my local authorities seriously when they closed schools and left casinos open.

TBF, casinos on Native American land aren't subject to US/state authority. Some might choose to mirror local decisions but they don't have to if they don't want to. Still the point is valid that what closed and what stayed open seemed arbitrary at best.

It was hard taking shutdown orders seriously when all sorts of small businesses fell into the non-essential designation while recreational marijuana shops were allowed to remain open for business. Worse, there was a brief period in my state where there was uncertainty about tax return preparation being an essential service right as the original April1 15 deadline for individual returns loomed.

Just because they are prisoners doesn't mean they aren't willing to help. More than you think have a sense of civic duty.

And many non-violent offenders who realize they screwed up and want to pay their debt to society relish the chance to be eligible for any sort of work detail regardless of the meager prison wages. Not only does it look good on their prison record if they serve their sentence without incident, it can also help them get a job upon their release if they can find an employer willing to give them a fresh start -- especially if their prison work detail involved skills currently in demand.

I mean, isn't a little odd that Chihuahua has unusually low covid numbers compared to it's neighbors meanwhile things are spilling over in El Paso?

Although I rated this thunkful, this scenario would pose a bit of a dilemma for President-Elect Biden. He's been rather emphatic that more should be done to fight COVID. However, Democrats have also made it clear they favor open borders or policies that would seemingly make it easier to enter and stay in the US illegally. What would Biden do if too many people south of the border tried entering the US illegally while they were infected with COVID?