"A world of hurt"

Note from Tom 11/14: I originally put this post yesterday, which meant it would have gone out in the email feed this morning. However, I forgot and put up today's post - "Do you notice a pattern here" - too early this morning, so it went got picked up by the feed instead. I've deleted yesterday's post, and this one will go out on Sunday.

Dr. Fauci said about a month ago that the US was going to be in “a world of hurt” soon. Well, we’re in it now. First cases skyrocket, then hospitalizations a couple weeks later, and finally deaths a couple weeks after that. Since daily new cases are almost triple what they were in late October (and rising at close to twice the October rate), and hospital beds (especially ICU beds) are close to filling up in a number of states, this means we’re well into the skyrocketing hospitalizations phase.

Two people wrote in this morning with comments on the hospitalization issue. One was Kevin Perry, who has contributed a number of times to this blog. He said:

What concerns me is that as the number of daily infections rises, the number of hospitalizations will rise.  Hospitals have two capacity issues.  The first, physical bed capacity, can be expanded as we saw earlier this year.  The second, medical staff capacity, cannot.  We were able to share staff resources earlier this year when parts of the country were hard hit while other parts were not.  The capacity to share staff has just about evaporated with the current wave being so widespread.  That, I fear, will have a significant adverse impact of the fatality rate

And the same former nurse who I wrote about this week said today:

Some writing is addressing the dwindling number of hospital beds in parts of the country and especially rural areas but, what is not being said about that is the most important part, once a bed is occupied you cannot put another patient in it until the current patient recovers or dies! We are rapidly approaching situations where you will not be able to get treatment for life threatening acute illnesses as simple as untreated appendicitis or more common heart attacks and strokes! This is really an unmitigated and unfolding disaster.

Deaths are climbing now. They currently average more than 1,000 a day, and we’ll probably be at 2,000 a day before long – a level we haven’t seen since late April. And we might start seeing a level I was predicting would happen by late April – a Sept. 11 (3,000 deaths) every day. Fortunately, we never reached that level except for one or two days in April or early May, but given the huge difference in daily new cases (180,000 yesterday, according to Worldometers.info – vs. 30-40,000 at its worst in April), there’s no reason why we won’t reach that level very soon, either.

But of course Mr. Trump is too busy with his crusade to combat fraudulent (i.e. non-Trump) ballots to pay attention to this unimportant matter. And Mitch says we just have to wait for him to come to accept reality – after all, we wouldn’t want to have him throw one of his patented tantrums, would we? Heaven forbid! Better to let additional tens of thousands of people die needlessly than try to do something about the problem.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

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