Have we lost our collective minds?

wifeandmore

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 3:55 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

So by that logic, we shouldn't drive because we'd rather be safe than sorry.

I really think you're pulling a joke here.
If not, I wont even start responding..
If you are, you're definitely creative with your example 😁

amother

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 3:58 pm

watergirl wrote:

OP, do you understand Covid math? Your posts make it seem like you truly do not understand the issues here.

I understand completely the exponential math. I also understand that it's based on completely unreliable data that science is scrapping the bottom of the barrel for. Sorry that I'm not comfortable on completely upending our way of life and causing an economic recession that will last for yours and won't just impact millions but hundreds of millions on numbers that are virtually meaningless.

reminds me of the quote "there are 3 types of lies: lies, darn lies, and statistics"

amother

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:01 pm

ora_43 wrote:

That's not what he's saying. He's saying thanks to the decisions policy-makers made, there should be enough capacity.

"Whoops, we didn't need to do that"

and

"Thank goodness we did that; it might even work"

are two very different things.

The UK locked down two days ago. US has been on lockdown for 10. If it had worked that quickly, the whole wold would be disease free. its pretty clear he vastly overestimated the risk.

https://www.theguardian.com/wo.....essay

amother

Lilac

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:03 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

too late - you weren't consulted.

syrima

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:23 pm

I just want to say that while I may not agree with OP, I think we can agree that there has been a quick shift in our lives to a LOT less autonomy than we are used to. This is stressful to all of us, but particularly to families with young kids who have a real need to run around and can't just sit and read yet. Some of us in cities are in close quarters without access to a real backyard. The thought of this going on even through Pesach is daunting.

amother

Pink

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:26 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

I understand completely the exponential math.

Where do you live? I live in crown heights and I never heard so many hatzolah sirens in such short time Can't Believe It

There's a huge tehillim list just for this... It's not like a car accident. That's a tragedy that's spread out statistically across the country. This is an epidemic that is very much felt in the community. Everyone is worried about their parents, grandparents and even young people. It's very real. Believe me.

southernbubby

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:40 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

So people should be able to make the choice to go outside if they are comfortable with the risk. I am comfortable with the risk of walking in the park, so I should be allowed to do so. Someone who is uncomfortable with said risk, can bubble wrap themselves inside, spray it with lysol, and stay there for the next 18 years if they so choose. I don't live in NY, I don't even live in a particularly dense area. When the parks were open a few days ago, people were definitely maintaining their distance.

So what if you accidentally spread the virus to someone who was trying to avoid it?

ora_43

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:40 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

He literally says in the article that the risk was greater than he initially thought.

the article wrote:

This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said.

amother

Papaya

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:49 pm

If we've learned anything from the measles spread is that some humans do not want to inconvenience themselves for the sake of OTHERS. If they don't feel at risk (rightly or wrongly) they will go about spreading their germs without care.
So telling them you may be ok but you will be harming others is just a waste of words.

amother

Green

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:50 pm

amother [ Babyblue ] wrote:

It has been taken into account by people a lot smarter than you.

The risk of death to society from Covid is a lot higher than the risk of death from abusers. And where are these abused people going to go to get their injuries fixed when the health care system is collapsed? To a certain extent they can help themselves. Covid victims can't when there's no more ventilators.

If you aren't a good parent and damage your child, that is on you not on society who made the decision not to collapse the health care system.

Take a parenting course or 30. Stimulate your child.

How incredible insensitive. That's the way to go!Attacking others Surprised

amother

Orange

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:51 pm

Chayalle wrote:

When one person dies from a car accident, it doesn't set off a domino effect such that all other drivers then die of car accidents.

But one person on the playground with COVID-19 is a different story.

I'm sorry, OP, but your analogy doesn't cut it.

thank you for saying this so clearly and politely. I dont think I would have been as polite.
OP you sound very young and unable to grasp a global view of things.

Amarante

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:52 pm

An interview with head of Chief Medical Officer at Mount Sinai in Brooklyn
This is nothing like seasonal flu.

It’s posted on the website for New York Magazine

Inside a Brooklyn Hospital Right Now
As told to Anna Silman

@annaesilman

From the moment he wakes up, Dr. Peter Shearer, the chief medical officer at Mount Sinai hospital in Brooklyn, spends his day thinking about coronavirus. As one of the hospital’s leaders, his job entails coordinating with the doctors, nurses, and technicians on the front lines of patient care, something that has gotten increasingly difficult as Mount Sinai tries to contain the spread among its own employees. Like every other hospital in the city, Shearer’s ER and ICU are now inundated with COVID-positive patients. With 10 to 15 percent of his staff now sick themselves and three to four COVID-19 deaths per day, Shearer says that it’s hard to imagine things being worse than they are now. And yet scientists still estimate that the virus won’t peak for another two to four weeks. As a testament to that, a 20-foot cooler truck is now parked right outside Shearer’s window, a mobile morgue meant to house bodies when the hospital’s facilities inevitably overflow. Shearer knows this is only the beginning, and so he and his Mt. Sinai Brooklyn colleagues have agreed to keep us updated on life inside the hospital. This is the first dispatch.

I wake up around five o’clock and I start thinking about coronavirus. I look at my phone to see which patients decompensated [organ or system failure resulting in an urgent change in vital signs] or coded [a failure of the heart or lungs requiring resuscitation] overnight. And then I start to think about what the hospital resources are and look at the current status of my inpatient units, and my ICUs — plural because we’ve created an extra one — and my emergency department. And then I start to try and figure out how we’re going to get through another day.

The number of very sick COVID patients coming in is tremendous. I don’t know if the word is exponentially or logarithmically, but the curve goes up steeply. It’s scary. Mount Sinai Brooklyn is a moderate-sized community hospital. We have 220 beds, we’ve planned a surge of up to 240 to 260. At the current moment I have 135 COVID-positive patients. There are probably another 10 or 15 that just don’t have test results back yet. And they are sick. They are the ones who need to be admitted to the hospital. It’s a few debilitated elderly from nursing homes, but there’s a lot of patients who are between the ages of 40 to 60 who may have some underlying health problems like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, and their lungs are very inflamed. They go from being moderately sick to crashing and needing to put on ventilators very quickly.
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I don’t think medical science has an understanding yet of why some people do so much worse than others. There are theories out there about the viral load and probably some genetic variation. It’s unclear. Certainly underlying things like diabetes and high blood pressure add to the equation. Smoking, lung disease, vaping absolutely doesn’t help. But I don’t think we know enough about the science of this yet to say what makes one person crash and burn when another person just has a fever and aches for a week.
The emergency department is just patient-to-patient lined up and packed in. It’s that awful picture you see of an overcrowded emergency department, just patient upon patient next to each other endlessly. It sounds like a low-level buzz of chaos. We have a no-visitor policy so that helps maintain a bit of control over things and allows a little bit of sanity, but it’s minimal. If every patient had one or two family members next to them, it would be unbearable.
Three weeks ago when we started to plan for this we came up with ideas like, This is the room that we’ll put a [seriously ill] coronavirus patient in. And then if there are a bunch of other patients, maybe four or five who are slightly sick, we’ll put them in this area where we close the door and keep them separate from everyone else. We were thinking about this room and that room. And now I’m up to 27 patients in my emergency department who are positive, waiting for beds in the hospital, and another 24 who are under evaluation. Those plans are ancient history now. In an ideal world, everyone has their own room, they would have negative pressure airflow and a face mask on and a dedicated nurse to care for them with a moderate ratio of patients. We can’t do that. No one can do that right now. Every hospital in New York is a variation of mine.

I would say 10 to 15 percent of the staff is out [sick with COVID]. Many of them have been tested, while some have just had symptoms and we know clinically that they’re positive. Some of the employees that are at higher risk for contracting the illness are our respiratory therapists. They’re putting people on ventilators and working around the part of the patient where they might get some aerosolized particles. They are uniquely skilled employees, and they’re dropping like flies. Normally I would have five on during a shift. I have two today, at the exact time I have more patients on ventilators than before.

I think we’re seeing three to four COVID deaths a day now. And that has changed in the past couple of days. There have been some younger people. The more upsetting things are the 50- and 60-year-old people are getting put on ventilators. They haven’t died yet. But there’s no treatment for this. We’re just giving supportive care to buy them some time, where we hope their lungs will heal. There’s no real improvement therapy. Everything you hear about things like Plaquenil (hydroxychloroquine) for the critically ill, it’s probably much less effective.

We’ve had some tragic situations. We’ve had two married couples where they’re both hospitalized. There was a couple in their late 80s. The husband died and his wife is in another ward of the hospital. They’re both isolated. We couldn’t even get her there. We have another married couple in their late 50s where one is doing much worse than the other and is on a ventilator. It’s very overwhelming.

We have very small morgues that can only hold five bodies at a time and they do tend to get picked up relatively quickly. There’s a truck parked outside my window now. It’s around 20 feet long, I assume it could hold 30 bodies minimum. It looks like a big trailer with a refrigerator unit on it. We haven’t had to use it yet. Inside it’s just a cold metal space. It’s not very respectful at the moment. I’m not going to hang curtains in it, but it needs to be a little bit more … something.

People have compared this to the early days of HIV. It feels like I can imagine how that was, but the numbers are more now. If you went back to that time, it was predominantly the gay community and focused in certain geographic parts of the city. This is every single hospital in the city, multiple patients dropping their oxygen levels surprisingly fast and being put on ventilators with no way to make them better. I’ve been through the blackout. I’ve been through Sandy. I’ve been through the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. And this is different. 9/11 was a horrendous thing, but there was no impact like this on hospitals. Sandy, some hospitals were completely devastated, and it was horrendous and awful, but the weather got better. And you could start cleaning up. But this is just getting worse. I have never been in a war. It feels like a war.

From the governor’s office, and from the modeling I get through the Mount Sinai health system, the peak will be somewhere between two to four weeks from now. But it’s pretty ******* awful right now. To think that somehow it’s going to get worse is hard to imagine. The governor has charged us with doubling the capacity of our hospital. I can put three people in rooms that should accommodate two. But I need nurses to care for them. It’s going to be tough.

I think conversations [about triage] will come into play in the next week or so. We don’t have medical therapy for this, all we have is supportive care. There are patients for whom that’s not going to save their life, it may actually add to their suffering. There are some patients who it’s not even really an option to put them on a ventilator. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. My father died in mid-December before this all started, at the age of 85. It was an acute perforation of his bowels. And in that situation, the doctor comes to you and says, “He’s dying and there’s nothing we can do, and we will make him comfortable and make sure that he doesn’t suffer.” And those are the conversations that we need to be having with patients and families now for whom ventilation is not an option.

We’re not quite there yet in terms of [choosing which patients should get ventilators over others], allocating resources. It’s hard to know, things change very quickly. There’s a document from the New York State Department of Health which has guidelines for how to allocate ventilator resources at the time of a pandemic. Basically, you give scores to patients based on how sick they are, and that helps you to assign a triage level to different people and then make those decisions of: I have one ventilator and two patients, which one am I choosing. Or: I have a 30-year-old in my ER and an 87-year-old in my ICU, and it gives you guidance to take the person in the ICU off the ventilator and give it to the 30-year-old.

Two weeks ago as we were ramping up, myself and the other members of our leadership team would round on the units and talk to the staff, because we knew they were becoming concerned and worried about what was coming. It was important for us to be out there to meet with the night shift, the day shift, nurses, techs, all those people, to really help prepare them and to show that we had their backs. I’m not doing that as much now because I don’t want to over-risk my exposure. I’m just one person and there’s not another department where other people can replace me. But I feel very badly about it, because I think the staff definitely needs it. It’s a sort of a sad part of this. Now we’re doing everything on the phone. We feel a bit more disconnected. It’s difficult. At a time where everyone needs to feel closer, we’re feeling apart.

I have a COVID-positive 41-year-old who just died about five minutes ago. I just got the message. He’s been in the unit for about a week. Initially he seemed to be doing better and then he didn’t. In terms of preexisting conditions, he had obesity and maybe some diabetes. Not a lot. We’re very tight on visitors, but they were able to get his wife up there a few times. It’s devastating. But I’m not the one at his bedside taking care of him, which would be our ICU director and the nurses. Among my people, people already know that for medical staff, the repercussions of this months and years down the road are going to be extreme. It goes back to the wartime analogy — people being in World War One being shell-shocked. Now you call it PTSD. It will be like that.

amother

Orange

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:53 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

The insinuation that by spreading a disease you are automatically causing a death is faulty. You can't prove that. No one can. I could spread it to 20 people and its entirely possible none of them would die.

I think there is something really wrong with you.I cant even finish reading this thread.

amother

Turquoise

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 4:56 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

The parks in my town are closed. Not just the playgrounds, but the walking parks too. I'm all for social distancing, but what we are doing is going to have MAJOR psychological and economic impacts on people that will reverberate for generations.
There are so many things we can do to encourage people to stay healthy without closing everything, including the parks. Wash your hands, don't sneeze in someone's face, stay home if you're sick, don't congregate in large groups.
I mean seriously, what am I supposed to do? Are my toddler and baby going to grow up for the next two years thinking the world begins and ends in my house? Does that sound healthy? IMO, closing everything down is going to make people less likely to be able to social distance for a longer period of time. It's going to drive people absolutely insane.
I already know the response is going to be "well when your relatives are in the hospital, you won't be singing the same tune". And "no amount of economic and mental anguish is worth even one life". But we do this ALL THE TIME. We'd have over 1 million less deaths if we stopped driving, but we've decided that the cure for that (not driving) is worse than the disease (over 1 million dying in traffic accidents). So when are we, as a collective community, decide that closing our parks is just not worth it??

There is a big park in my neighborhood. I was taking my kids every day to run around, to spread out a blanket on the grass and picnic, to have our homeschool outdoors for a bit and get sun and fresh air.
There were other people around, but we were always 100, maybe 200 feet away from others. Social distancing at its best.
Yesterday they locked it up. That was our last refuge of normal. I am pissed off.
This closure was unnecessary and detrimental to our physical and mental health.
Our world is indeed nuts.
My only comfort is knowing that this has to be the ushering in of mashiach. It just has to be.

Amarante

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 5:00 pm

amother [ Turquoise ] wrote:

Unfortunately enough people didn’t use their brains in terms of practicing social distancing and engaged in unsafe behavior so that the only thing to do was shut down places where people continued to congregate. There is not enough manpower to police every park to make sure people aren’t acting foolishly. We have all seen pictures of mass gatherings in parks and beaches despite warnings. They have closed large recreational facilities in Los Angeles because of people being too close to each other.

Last edited by Amarante on Thu, Mar 26 2020, 5:11 pm; edited 1 time in total

amother

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 5:02 pm

amother [ Orange ] wrote:

I think there is something really wrong with you.I cant even finish reading this thread.

No. I'm asking whats the number

We as a society have decided that 1.25 million dead is an acceptable number in order to protect our privilege to drive. If driving killed 1 billion people, we wouldn't drive. Obviously everything that could potentially cause death has a threshold number where people are willing to trade the deaths for the convenience that the activity affords us.

The flu in a bad year kills 61,000 people. We don't shut down schools, parks and the economy even in a bad flu year so we've as a society decided that 61,000 deaths is acceptable in order to continue our way of life.

My question is, what number of deaths becomes so widely unacceptable that we will stop completely living our lives and remain confined to our homes for months on end?

amother

Aquamarine

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 5:13 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

I agree with you on this point, OP.

I think it's about getting used to something. We as a society have just gotten used to 1.25 million people dying a year in car accidents. We have just not gotten used to this coronavirus. That's it.

amother

Salmon

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 5:15 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

You ask good questions. You make good points. Don't think you will get good answers, though.

amother

Pearl

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 5:20 pm

amother [ OP ] wrote:

Your comparisons make no sense. Driving is not an illness. It is a positive thing, and it SAVES lives. I wonder how many more would die without motor vehicle transportation?

The flu in a bad year? You mean like the Spanish flu in 1918? When, yes, they shut everything down?

How many people died from the flu today in New York city? (The flu didn't go away, it's still here)
How many people died from coronavirus today in New York city?

How quickly is the death rate doubling? Look it up. Does that happen with the flu??

SMH.

amother

Cobalt

Thu, Mar 26 2020, 5:23 pm

OP didn't read the whole thread but I can tell you the reason parks are closed in our area is because some uber chochom decided to make a minyan in the park and that was the end of that.